Jean Rhys was a perpetual outsider. Born Welsh and Creole into largely black Dominican society in 1890, she was out of place everywhere – too foreign for Europe, too Caribbean for Britain, too white for Dominica, and much too female to be taken seriously as a writer for most of her lifetime.
But her literary influence continues to grow and resonate, especially with American critic and curator Hilton Als. His group show is a heady, passionate, experimental love letter to Jean Rhys – to her literature, her in-betweenness, her life of unbound creativity in a postcolonial world – in the vein of his previous exhibitions-as-portraits of Joan Didion and James Baldwin.
