Newly independent African countries wanted to project—both inward and outward—a forward-looking, progressive, and cosmopolitan self-image, and modern architecture embodied this aspiration. A new architectural identity engaged with the political ideas of Pan-Africanism and Africanization, and was shaped by architects both from the continent and abroad.

Architectural drawings, models, and archival images, as well as newly commissioned site-specific photographs and videos, are among the exhibition’s 400 objects. Nearly all are being shown publicly for the first time. Spanning Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon, Architects of Liberation is a revealing look at a region reimagining its future.

Please note that Gallery 4E will be temporarily closed on Monday, September 28 from 4 to 4:45 p.m.

Source: MoMA

The post MoMA presents “Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa” appeared first on waau art.

Reaffirming the importance of Parks’ legacy in the 21st century, the exhibition provides fresh insight into his work, as memory and anecdote animate photographs long-since analyzed, studied and examined, revealing levels of detail and depth previously unavailable. Written reflections include those from Kathleen Cleaver (The Black Panthers, 1970), Kate Clark Harris (The Doll Test, 1947), Kyle Johnson (The Learning Tree, 1969) and Cora Taylor (Segregation in the South, 1956), each direct subjects of Parks’ photographs. Additional reflections have been provided by Lonnie Ali, widow of Muhammad Ali; Qubilah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X; Gloria Vanderbilt’s son, CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper and Ingrid Bergman’s daughter, actress Isabella Rossellini. Contributions have also been made by filmmaker Ava DuVernay; Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative; Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple (1982), and her daughter, writer and producer Rebecca Walker; Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Deborah Willis, University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University; artist Hank Willis Thomas; and Ambassador Andrew Young, who participated in the 1963 March on Washington that Parks photographed.

“Over the last twenty years, The Gordon Parks Foundation has built relationships with many of the people that Gordon Parks photographed and got to know personally. We are honored to have so many of their stories brought together in an exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, one that will allow us to continue learning from them, so that the past may continue to inspire us,” said Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Executive Director of The Gordon Parks Foundation.

In 1947, Kate Clark Harris’ parents, Dr. Kenneth Clark and Dr. Mamie Clark, were photographed by Parks as they conducted their ‘doll tests’—groundbreaking experiments that revealed the psychological effects of segregation on African American children. The tests were conducted using several dolls, all identical except for skin color, that were put before Black children, aged 3–7, who were asked to identify which one they preferred. The majority preferred the white doll, leading Drs. Clark to conclude that ‘prejudice, discrimination and segregation’ damaged their self-esteem and caused Black children to develop a sense of inferiority. In Doll Test, Harlem, New York (1947), Parks’ photograph shows a young boy in the midst of the test and pointing at a white doll held next to a black one. Harris remembered these tests and their psychological toll at length, concluding with the following sentiment: “One of the things that Gordon was so good at is getting beyond the surface and getting the feelings beneath. And so the pictures convey that, you can’t ignore it—you can’t.”

As one of his many projects for the magazine throughout his life, in the summer of 1956, Life sent Parks to Alabama to document the daily realities of Black Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the rural South. Eschewing a journalistic approach that focused on the leaders and momentous events of the struggle for civil rights, Parks’ empathetic approach instead portrayed the common humanity of his fellow Americans going about daily life in unjust circumstances. In At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama (1956), Parks photographed a young girl being helped up to drink from the ‘colored only’ water fountain in front of a general store, as two women look on. In excerpts of her full remarks, one of these women, Cora Taylor, remembers the moment and the photograph: “I wondered what was going on, because you didn’t know who to trust and who not to trust. I let my mother know about the photograph, in case anything went wrong. A few weeks later I saw the picture in Life magazine, and I just couldn’t believe it.”

One of Parks’ most indelible portraits, Eldridge Cleaver and His Wife, Kathleen, Algiers, Algeria (1970), was made while on assignment for Life to report on the Black Panthers and their leaders. After serving a prison term, Cleaver was on parole when authorities ordered him back to prison because of his involvement in a Panther-police incident. He subsequently fled the country and moved to Algiers, where Parks met and interviewed him and his wife Kathleen Cleaver, who reflected on that time and the power of photography, excerpted here: “This photograph was taken in a very remote, isolated place. If you saw where we lived, it was not that historic. That’s the joy of photography—you isolate what’s important.”

Accompanying these intimate stories are the insights from those who collaborated or worked with Parks during his life and were able to observe both his working methods and his personal character, such as Academy Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who worked as a publicist for Parks’ 2000 documentary, Half Past Autumn. Encapsulating the importance and poignancy of Parks’ work, DuVernay’s words offer a powerful summation of what the chorus of contributors to Voices in the Mirror articulate in their own singular way: “He did not bring elegance to Black life. He captured the elegance that is Black life.”

About The Gordon Parks Foundation
The Gordon Parks Foundation supports and produces artistic and educational initiatives that advance the legacy and vision of Gordon Parks—recognized as the most significant American photographer of the 20th century, as well as a writer, musician and filmmaker, who used the arts to further “the common search for a better life and a better world.” The Foundation was co-founded in 2006 by Parks with his longtime friend and editor at Life magazine, Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., to preserve his creative work and support the next generation of artists advancing social justice.

Through exhibitions, publications and public programs, organized in collaboration with institutions internationally and at its exhibition space in Pleasantville, New York, the Foundation provides access to and supports understanding of, the work and contributions of Gordon Parks for artists, scholars, students and the public. The Foundation’s archive houses Gordon Parks’s photographs, negatives, contact sheets, publications and a selection of ephemera related to his work in photography, film, music and writing. The archive also includes collections by related artists.

Drawing inspiration from the pivotal role of a fellowship Parks received early in his career, the Foundation’s educational and grant-making initiatives are core to its mission and year-round activities. Through fellowships, prizes and scholarships, the Foundation provides vital support to artists, writers and students—current and future generations of creatives whose work continues his legacy. These initiatives are made possible through The Gordon Parks Arts and Social Justice Fund, established by the Foundation in 2019.

Source: Jack Shainman Gallery

The post Jack Shainman Gallery presents “Voices in the Mirror” by Gordon Parks appeared first on waau art.

Tolika is a term used across several South African languages meaning “to translate” or “to interpret”. The word derives from the Dutch tolk, meaning “interpreter”, while mtoliki refers to someone who translates or interprets. The title evokes histories of linguistic and cultural movement, as well as the transformations that accompany displacement. Translation does not mean reproducing an original meaning unchanged; it means transferring meaning into another context, where it inevitably shifts.

In Nicholas Hlobo’s work, ribbon, leather, wood, rubber detritus and found objects are stitched and assembled together into hybrid forms exploring identity, masculinity and his Xhosa heritage.

Bulumko Mbete draws on textile, beading and weaving traditions passed through her family and community, treating them as indigenous archives of migration and generational knowledge.

Kagiso Patrick Mautloa combines found objects from Johannesburg with constructed forms, bringing the physical traces of urban life into his sculptures.

Frans Thoka uses the prison blanket as both an object and a subject, addressing imprisonment, migration, displacement and land dispossession.

Mankebe Seakgoe’s work moves between language and drawing. Her inscriptions resemble writing while resisting a fixed reading, allowing language to become something felt as much as understood.

Xhanti Zwelendaba and Benjamin Stanwix rework and recontextualise photographs of South African landscapes onto ikhukho, a traditional handwoven grass or reed mat, bringing histories of place into new contexts.

Tolika Mtoliki ultimately offers a dialogue between objects, languages, and memories, where each artwork becomes its own form of translating the world.

Source: MAGNIN-A

The post MAGNIN-A presents “Tolika Mtoliki”, a group exhibition appeared first on waau art.

Source: Edinburgh Art Festival

The post EAF26 presents “Among People” by Jillian Edelstein appeared first on waau art.

In Kala, Buthelezi extends this enquiry into the realm of measurement, asking how we might take account of ourselves and the world at a cultural moment of uncertainty. The isiZulu imperative that is the title translates to “weigh it” or “measure it,” invoking both the logic of calculation and the limits of it. In a pervasive societal milieu where value is increasingly determined by metrics, productivity, and modes of extraction, Buthelezi attempts to measure what refuses calculation: hope, memory, collective dignity, spiritual inheritance, and the distance between who we are and who we might yet become. What forms of knowledge remain, she asks, when conventional systems of measurement no longer suffice?

Across the exhibition, spheres, topographies, concentric circles, and fragmented landscapes manifest as recurring forms. The works recall celestial maps, geological formations, and ancient tools of navigation, occupying a material and conceptual space between the terrestrial and the esoteric. These forms become tools with which Buthelezi attempts to locate the self within a world that feels increasingly unstable: to take measure of how far we have strayed, what has been lost, and what might still be recovered. Rather than describing the world, the works propose another way of reading it, one where intuition and calculation, matter and memory, the mundane and the metaphysical coexist.

Through repetition and methodical labour, she treats materials as carriers of knowledge: repositories of information that can be accessed, exchanged, and transformed through making. Glass beads, natural fibres, clay, and found earth matter are layered into densely worked surfaces that record time as much as form. The work unfolds intuitively. Rather than imposing meaning onto the materials, Buthelezi allows it to emerge through sustained engagement with them.

This sustained engagement with material becomes a form of measurement in itself. Every reiterated gesture, woven strand, and positioned bead records duration, attention, and embodied labour, transmuting time itself into a visceral presence. In Kala, calculation becomes less about arriving at certainty than about cultivating a heightened awareness of the relationships that bind body to landscape, the individual to the collective, and the present to ancestral, multi-directional time. Making becomes a mode of enquiry through which systems of knowledge are not illustrated, but both preserved and produced.

A monumental sphere, titled Mhlaba, becomes a focal form for the exhibition’s central themes. Neither complete nor intact, the work appears suspended in state between formation and erosion. It evokes the Earth, but also a charged body; one marked by extraction, transformation, and latent potential. Its surface is layered with tactile constellations built from cut segments of ‘icansi’, traditional mats hand-woven from iNcema bulrushes. Used across South Africa in ceremonial, ritual and domestic contexts, these mats carry cultural and spiritual significance that extends beyond their everyday function.

The Abacus, an extensive wall-hung installation, transforms an ancient tool of calculation into a distorted meditation on what cannot be counted. Ebonised, handmade clay beads shift across a series of open contour lines. Released from the confines of the abacus’s conventional four-sided boundary, the instrument becomes mutable and porous, exposed to forces of motion, time, deduction and addition. Together, the exhibition’s recurring forms – orb, contour, grid, and horizon – function less as symbols than as devices of orientation. They suggest that the act of measuring is inseparable from the act of locating oneself: within history, within landscape, within inherited frameworks of knowledge and belief.

This search for orientation is also a return to the source. “I am aware that I am ancient”, Buthelezi has shared, gesturing toward the understanding that this knowing moves across generations through ritual, ancestral lineage, spiritual gifts, and the embodied act of art-making. Her materials become a didactic device, a kind of spiritual technology: holding information from the past, while generating new insights for those who come after. Here, making is simultaneously an inward journey and an outward act of transmission, locating the artist within a continuum that extends beyond the limits of an individual lifetime.

Kala proposes that before we can imagine a way forward, we must first take account of the conditions of the present, quantifying not only what has been lost through extraction and dehumanisation, but also what continues to endure through connection, ritual, and community. Ultimately, Kala asks not how we measure the world, but what we choose to measure. It invites an alternative currency of value; one rooted in attention, care, and the belief that making remains a vital way of processing the conditions of the present.

Source: Southern Guild Cape Town

The post Southern Guild Cape Town presents “Kala” by Simphiwe Buthelezi appeared first on waau art.

The women in Mckinney’s paintings possess a timeless quality, often situated within familiar domestic scenes that evoke a subtle nostalgia. While viewers may recognize the intimate spaces or the emotions reflected in the subject’s knowing glances, the paintings also maintain a distance. Mckinney balances this deep emotional resonance with the essential unknowability of the subject, reminding us that the full familiarity of another’s inner world remains outside our reach. This tension between the known experience and the private self creates a magnetic pull, transforming moments of quiet introspection into meditations on solitude, respite, and shared human connection.

Beyond the subject, Mckinney’s technique – her engagement with the history of art, color theory, and longstanding traditions of portraiture – further contributes to the allure of her paintings. Her figures emerge from dark grounds, recalling the tenebrism used by artists for centuries to focus the viewer’s attention and heighten atmosphere. The compositions also contain literal references to Modern painting, not only through the gestural strokes of paint, but also through the inclusion of paintings within paintings with allusions to works by artists such as Matisse and Picasso.

Shelter is Mckinney’s largest museum exhibition to date. It will offer a collective understanding of the artist’s gift for weaving together art history, emotionally resonant subjects, and beautifully rendered paintings. Layering technique and reference, Mckinney’s sensual interiors become necessary sites of spiritual restoration, proving internal shelter is fostered through authority over one’s own time. As Mckinney has shared: “We live in a world where we’re running. There’s beauty in rest.”

Source: The Norton Museum of Art

The post The Norton Museum of Art presents “Danielle Mckinney: Shelter” appeared first on waau art.

An outcome of sustained and ongoing engagement with artists and artwork, the Broad collection is distinctive in its exceptional dedication to the full arc of artists’ careers. The Broad has highlighted this depth through expansive presentations in the third floor galleries, featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol along with works by many others.

Source: The Broad

The post The Broad presents “Expansive Presentation of Jean-Michel Basquiat” appeared first on waau art.

Across a new body of paintings on black velvet and the expansive portrait installation, The Souls of Black Folk, Mivekannin considers the people whose movements, ideas, and labor have shaped the histories they inhabit. Portraiture becomes a means of making these histories present: questioning who is remembered, who is made visible, and how their legacies are carried forward.

Taking its title from Saint-John Perse’s 1942 poem, Exile, written during the French poet and Nobel laureate’s years of exile in the United States, Porteurs de feu draws inspiration from the line, “We, bearers of fire, we, sowers of cities.” For Mivekannin, exile is not an end, but a condition that compels one to carry. Fire becomes language, memory, music, painting – that which survives displacement and can be transmitted across places and generations. To “sow cities” is to create new imaginaries, reflecting the role that artists and thinkers have played in continually making and remaking the places in which they live.

Having long turned to the European art historical canon as a site of interrogation and revision, in this body of work, Mivekannin expands his field of reference to artists who have shaped his understanding of New York and American cultural life. Moving between immigrants and their descendants, Black American artists, and figures whose work engages questions of migration, race, displacement, and belonging, he enters into dialogue with David Hammons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Nona Faustine, Kerry James Marshall, Emanuel Leutze, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and John White Alexander, among others. Together, these references construct an image of America shaped not by a singular lineage, but through intersecting histories of movement, struggle, cultural exchange, and reinvention as a means of survival.

Mivekannin reinterprets well-known works and iconic images, inserting his own likeness into their compositions to explore artistic inheritance and the ways histories are continually rewritten. The source material becomes a means of reconsidering migration, visibility, and privilege through images embedded in the cultural imagination. In Homer’s The Gulf Stream, a Black man survives alone amid an unforgiving sea. Mivekannin replaces the storm with the expanse of the night sky; where Homer paints chaos and danger, his figure lies at rest, unafraid beneath the stars. Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware offers another image of passage, but one monumentalized as a founding myth, which Mivekannin describes as “the crossing that is glorified.” He answers it with what he calls “the other crossing” – the one without a flag, without a hero; the one that goes unnamed.

Elsewhere, Lunch atop a Skyscraper becomes an image of the invisible labor on which New York was built. Mivekannin draws a line between the migrant body subjected to inspection on arrival and the bodies that would go on to construct the city: “At Ellis Island, bodies were inspected. Here, the sky is built.”

Rest, too, is political. The bourgeois repose of John White Alexander is reimagined as a Black body floating beyond the confines of the domestic interior: “In my version, rest has no walls.” Kerry James Marshall’s reclining Black figure offers another proposition – “rest that no longer needs permission” – turning leisure from a marker of privilege into an assertion of presence.

Mivekannin’s revisionist interventions are not merely self-portraits. He describes his own recurring image as “an element of transference,” a body through which another history might be inhabited and reconsidered. By placing himself within compositions from which Black bodies have historically been absent, marginalized, anonymized, or subjected to the gaze of others, he shifts the terms of representation. As he reflects, “To shift the gaze of others, one must first accept putting oneself on the line.”

The black velvet on which these figures emerge intensifies the tension between visibility and disappearance. A difficult material to work with, it absorbs both color and light, allowing bodies to hover between presence and obscurity. This material language extends Mivekannin’s broader practice, in which old bedsheets – often sourced from French wedding trousseaux – are steeped in restorative elixir baths used in Vodou rites originating in the historic Kingdom of Dahomey. Like shrouds, these fabrics carry the traces of other lives. Through painting, ritual and transformation, Mivekannin seeks to make present those whom history has obscured.

Presented in dialogue with the new paintings, The Souls of Black Folk extends these questions across more than a century of Black thought, creativity, and resistance. Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s landmark 1903 publication, the installation comprises portraits of Black political leaders, writers, artists, musicians, and activists spanning generations, geographies, and ideological positions, each paired with layered excerpts from Du Bois’s text. Writing of the “double consciousness” produced by racism in the United States, Du Bois describes how “One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”[1] (#_ftn1) Rather than presenting a singular historical narrative, Mivekannin’s installation gathers figures whose differing positions and contributions attest to the continuing struggle over how Black histories are lived, represented, and remembered.

Du Bois and Perse offer two interconnected points of departure. For Mivekannin, Du Bois names the wound of double consciousness and histories that have been silenced, while Perse gives voice to the momentum of those who keep moving forward through the darkness. Between them runs a thread: the capacity to carry history without being reduced to it. In the artist’s words, “Each portrait tells the story of the journey: exile, loss, the human condition, but also the human genius to transcend reality through creation.”

Coinciding with Mivekannin’s first visit to New York, Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire)emerges from a city that previously only existed for him through the works of others. It is a New York at once real and imagined: a place made and remade through artistic invention, political struggle, and the people who have arrived from elsewhere. Conceived amid renewed debates around migration and belonging, the exhibition affirms artistic creation as a force that defies borders and the semiotics of bureaucracy. To carry fire is not to romanticize exile or the conditions that produce it. It is to insist on what can be made in spite of them: to carry what survives, to transmit it, and to create something from which others might begin.

Source: Southern Guild

The post Southern Guild New York presents “Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire)” by Roméo Mivekannin appeared first on waau art.

For its Eighth edition, Découvertes brings together four artists whose practices offer different ways of looking at the world and inhabiting it. Through painting, photography, collage, installation, and textile-based imagery, Naëtt Mbaye, Chelsea Odufu, Saleh Lô and Raé explore our relationship to visibility, representation, transmission, and transformation.

Some will draw our attention to realities we have learned to overlook. But all invite us to shift our gaze- not to see more, but to see differently. Together, their practices remind us that to exist is also to exist within the gaze of others.

With Naëtt Mbaye, looking becomes transmission. Drawing on family archives, stories passed down through generations, and the figures of the Driankés, her work celebrates the women who hold a central place within West African societies. Her photographs, extended through monumental textile veils embroidered with beads, evoke both intimate history and collective memory. Between heritage and contemporary reinterpretation, the artist invites us to cast a renewed gaze upon those who transmit, preserve, and shape the narratives from which we come from.

This reflection on transmission continues in the work of Chelsea Odufu. A multidisciplinary artist and world- builder, she creates images where African traditions, spiritualities, fashion, and imaginaries coexist freely. Ornaments inspired by Baoulé gold weights, sculptural silhouettes, spectacular adornments, and vibrant colours give rise to figures that seem to belong simultaneously to an ancestral past and to a future yet to be imagined. In her work, looking becomes a projection. It is no longer simply about seeing the world as it is, but imagining what it could become.

With Saleh Lô, looking becomes an imperative. For more than a decade, the artist has devoted a significant part of his practice to the Talibés, children encountered every day in the streets of Senegal whom we no longer truly see. Through deeply moving portraits and a monumental installation in which iconic tomato paste cans become silent witnesses to their condition, Saleh Lô confronts us with a social reality that familiarity has rendered invisible. His work reminds us that looking is also an act of responsibility.

Finally, with Raé, looking turns inward. Her works on handmade plant-based paper and her experimental photographs seek less to represent the world than to transform the way we perceive it. Organic landscapes, subtle plays of light, and sensitive compositions become the setting for a contemplative experience that invites us to slow down, observe differently, and question our certainties. Where the other artists reveal presences, Raé invites us to shift our own perspective.

Thus, “Come closer, have a look”, is more than an invitation extended to the visitor. Behind these words lies a deeper question: How do we look at the world around us? Do we see those whom society has rendered invisible? Do we acknowledge the legacies that have shaped us? Can we imagine the futures that lie before us? Do we recognize the joy, beauty, and complexity of the lives that surround us?

A gaze can reveal, acknowledge, transmit, celebrate, transform, or heal. Découvertes #8 reminds us that sometimes, all it takes is a shift in perspective to reveal what has been there all along, right before our eyes.

Source: LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery

The post LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery presents “Découvertes #8” by Naëtt Mbaye, Chelsea Odufu, Saleh Lô and Raé appeared first on waau art.

Meaning “with you”, “alongside you”, or more broadly “oneness” in isiZulu, Kanye Nawe reflects a philosophy of shared presence that underpins Muholi’s longstanding commitment to documenting, preserving, and celebrating Black LGBTQIA+ lives while challenging historical erasure. Opening shortly after Faces and Phases 20, an off-site presentation of the project held during the 61st Venice Biennale, the exhibition coincides with various personal and historical anniversaries that have shaped the trajectory of Muholi’s practice. Among them are 20 years since the inception of Faces and Phases (2006–ongoing), 20 years since South Africa’s Civil Union Act legalised same-sex marriage, and the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s Constitution.

Central to the exhibition is Faces and Phases, widely regarded as one of the most significant visual records of Black LGBTQIA+ lives globally. Initiated in South Africa in 2006 in response to the violence and hate crimes faced by Black Queer communities, the series sought to challenge their absence and misrepresentation within public and historical records. Since then, it has expanded into a transnational project encompassing participants photographed across multiple continents. Kanye Nawe brings together early portraits made in South Africa alongside recent additions produced in London, Porto, Panama City, Los Angeles, Salvador, São Paulo, Venice, and Rio de Janeiro.Another section of the exhibition presents works from Only Half the Picture, Being, Mo(u)rning, LiZa, and ZaVa, series that explore intimacy, desire, and the complexities of Queer relationships. Together, these photographs bear witness to tenderness, vulnerability, loss, and connection, foregrounding relationships as sites of care, solidarity, and mutual recognition.

In Somnyama Ngonyama, the artist uses their own body as a site through which histories of race, labour, gender, sexuality, and representation are examined and reclaimed. Created while travelling for exhibitions, residencies, and research, the portraits function as a form of visual journaling, responding to the places Muholi inhabits and the objects and encounters that surround them. As Faces and Phases builds a living archive of community, Somnyama Ngonyama traces a parallel record of self-reflection. The works presented in Kanye Nawe include recent self-portraits made in Cape Town, Paternoster, London, Los Angeles, Panama City, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Drawing on personal memory, spirituality, and the body as a vessel of both vulnerability and resilience, three large-scale bronze sculptures explore themes of protection, mourning, ancestry, and survival. Across disciplines, Muholi’s practice remains rooted in the act of bearing witness, affirming dignity, self-determination, and the enduring presence of Black Queer lives.

Source: Southern Guild

The post Southern Guild presents “Kanye Nawe” by Zanele Muholi appeared first on waau art.