Over the course of a 50-year career, the artist Willie Birch has been unafraid to confront the ugly truths of American history as it relates to Black identity. “It’s incumbent to me to understand that I owe something to my ancestors,” he told Cultured magazine in 2022. “My work is loaded with them.” Birch was born in New Orleans in 1942, but trained in Europe, Baltimore, and New York. That global perspective grounded his work around “retentions,” a term Birch uses to illustrate how traditions from different cultures appear in Black American life. A new exhibition chronicles his examination of the interconnectedness of global cultures, while also amplifying the Black American experience as a whole. The works, mostly on paper, are organized in three sections: pieces from the early 1960s, his focus on papier-mâché sculpture in the 1980s, and his large-scale charcoals. This is Birch’s first career retrospective. —Maggie Turner