In recent years, the Yale School of Art Painting and Printmaking department has presented thematic year-end exhibitions that travel to galleries selected by the graduating MFA class. The 2024 thesis presentation, curated by Sophy Naess and Kari Rittenbach, “and the forms which linger, humming in our ears”, drew its title from Aimé Césaire’s 1955 poem Le verbe mâronner, an imagined dialogue between himself and the older poet Rene Depestre. The poetic dialogue toyingly yet sincerely questions the relationship of the artist and of the artwork to the institution, to history and tradition and to the western canon at large, ultimately arguing for artistic experimentation as an urgent and necessary liberating mechanism. A conceptually distinct iteration of this presentation is currently on view in New York and will subsequently travel to Hong Kong. Taking stock of this tradition – of a highly anticipated group presentation coming out of a storied institution – David Castillo reflects back on the 2024 cohort’s two years of artistic labor in its summer exhibition …… And the dogs were silent.

Aimé Césaire’s 1943 surrealist play of the same name is a text that went virtually undiscovered until 2008, when literary historian and translator Alex Gil found the manuscript in a small rural archive outside of Paris. The discovery of this play changed our understanding of Cesaire and his oeuvre. The text is laden with evidence of surrealist prose explored further by the artist in the second half of the 1940s, his explicit anti-colonial doctrine developed at length in the 1950s, his critical fabulations of the 1960s and the more accessible poetic prose of his later career. This exhibition, thus, makes less reference to the work’s content and more so to the work’s obscurity and later discovery, to its inwardly clairvoyant tendencies and early conception in Cesaire’s career.

…… And the dogs were silent presents the sketches, studies, and small format works that led up to this year’s thesis presentation at Yale. Concerned with kinetic and plural meaning over finite singularity, this exhibition expands and mobilizes the painting plane beyond the singular.