MoMA celebrates African portraiture in a far-reaching exhibition

In the 1990s, the late Congolese philosopher, academic, and author Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (1941-2025) released The Idea of Africa, which is described as a scholarly exploration of Western perception of the continent and the need for Africans to avoid those frameworks.

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, draws from that book and explores themes such as Pan-African subjectivity and solidarity through photography. The exhibition is the third show at MoMA from the 2019 gift of modern and contemporary African art from collector Jean Pigozzi, alongside a selection of recent acquisitions and key loans.

Here, we speak to curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo on how the exhibition came to life.

Wallpaper: Can you tell us about the exhibition title?

Oluremi C. Onabanjo: This exhibition is entitled Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination. With this title, I'm referencing ideas as they've been formulated across the African continent and diaspora. I'm taking cues from a fantastic book by the late Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, the Congolese philosopher, called The Idea of Africa published in 1994. Thirty years after that book was published I was assigned this exhibition and I had recently been returning to his work and thinking a lot about its potential.

I was thinking about what it would look like if one brought those ideas to bear on images introduced to New York in the 1990s, within the context of some really excellent African photography survey shows, and also wondering why it's important to continue looking at those images now. Which brings me to portraiture and political imagination, the second part of the title, which is thinking about creativity both in front of and behind the camera. I'm offering viewers an exhibition that offers critical lessons on the history of self-determination, solidarity, and subjectivity on the African continent and in the diaspora in the mid 20th century.

What can you share about the selection of artists and work featured in this exhibition?

What I'm really aiming for is an interpretive view of the history of photography in Africa. This is not an exhibition that aims to give you an exhaustive chronological history nor a geographic cartographic survey of the continent in every single practitioner, though I feel those exhibitions are extremely important. What I'm offering is a way for people to look, think and make connections across images and in so doing, it allows people to trace an intellectual history, a spirit of Pan-African potential across the African continent.

I feel like it's important to think about what the potential of seeing, for example, a suite of fantastic Seydou Keita images made in the 1950s and 60s in Bamako [the capital of Mali] next to an image of Samuel Fosso embodying the great Seydou Keita in his African spirit series. And that image might be next to an image of Samuel Fosso embodying Kwame Nkrumah [pan-Africanist and Ghana’s first President] across from a text that demonstrates Nkrumah's image-like sense of vision for the continent in the 1960s saying “this is no ordinary wind of change, this is the raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand.”

What are you excited about visitors discovering here?

You might encounter some really fabulous photographic portraits from the studio of the great Sanlé Sory in Bobo Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. Both are really fabulous souvenir portraits, as well as images from his studio.

But you could also find really rigorously composed portraits of the late J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, whose monumental hairstyles project really gives you a history of newly independent Nigeria through the various hairstyles of its fabulous women. But you could also encounter some unexpected choices, which I think are really important, such as Njideka Akunyili-Crosby’s majestic multimedia work, which incorporates acetone transfers, marble dust, and watercolour. So it's photographic in its making, and in the spirit of that allows people to make connections.

And then a recent acquisition into the [MoMA] collection of Silvia Rosi, who's an Italian photographer of Togolese descent, who is as much a student of the history of West African photographic portraiture as I am, but is an incredible conceptual artist who puts herself in front of the camera and makes these really brilliant meditative images that tell us why it's continually important to look at the form and the substance of this history. I'm trying to encourage people to think about the potential of images to tell us histories, positions, gestures and possibilities.

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 25 July 2026

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