Édouard Glissant's personal art collection makes US debut

This spring, CARA presents The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant—the first US exhibition of the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant's (1928–2011) personal art collection. Traveling from Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, Brazil, The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds reveals a lesser-known dimension of Glissant’s life: his vision for a museum. He conceived of it not as a monument, but as a space capable of holding art, memories, and intertwined histories without reducing them to colonial frameworks. Errantry, central to Glissant’s thinking and this vision for a museum, is movement, encounter, and reinvention. It unfolds through the crossing of borders—geographic, linguistic, and historic—and resists the pull toward singular origins or stories. Glissant imagined both