William Demby: tremendous mobility is an exhibition project entirely dedicated to the rediscovery of the archive of author, journalist, musician, and actor William Demby, a prominent figure of postwar Italy who deserves attention and further exploration.

His participation in the Avant-Garde of the fifties in Rome, collecting artworks and shaping the interdisciplinarity of the scene, along with his experimental contributions to the literary canon should be evidence enough of this, while his writing on Post Colonial Ethiopia and Eritrea and reviews of seminal events like the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1959 and the Venice Biennial in 1956 are singular in their perspective and critique. The exhibition brings together unpublished documents and photographs along with a range of published material with artistic meditations on his historical impact by Kevin Jerome Everson and Justin Randolph Thompson.

The project is an extension of the multiyear residency of The Recovery Plan at Murate Art District in the form of the research platform Black Archive Alliance initiated in 2021. The exhibition draws upon the research of Melanie Masterton Sherazi and Shelleen Greene along with a range of recent scholarly contributions to Demby. It is realized in direct collaboration with James Demby, the custodian of his parents’ archive and legacy and it represents a groundbreaking contribution to the artistic story of this Afro-descendant figure in the arts of the second half of the twentieth century.