Jean Rhys refused categorisation. Born in the late 1800s to a Welsh father and third-generation Creole mother in Dominica, Rhys was a white child in a primarily Black society. While she came to Europe in her teens, variously moving between France, the UK and the Netherlands, her writing retained a rich understanding of the place and culture of her birth. Her stories are full of complicated women, exploring the experience of exile and the power dynamics of sex and love through her lived understanding of racial and class complexities.
Her evocative prose is the starting point for Hilton Als’ new show at Michael Werner in London, which takes an experimental curatorial approach, drawing on artists past and present to evoke her world without neatly defining it. Als, an American writer with over 30 years’ experience at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize for theatre criticism, often centres his curation around larger-than-life literary figures. In 2022, he delved into the world of Joan Didion at the Hammer Museum, and the next year, he examined James Baldwin and fellow voices of queer resistance at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery.
