MoMA to Stage Major Exhibition on Mid-Century African Modernism, Centered on the Concept of ‘Emancipatory Art’  

The Museum of Modern Art in New York will stage a major exhibition examining mid-century modernism in Africa next year.

Running May 2–August 14, 2027, the thematic exhibition, titled “Freedom and Futures: Emancipatory Art in Africa, 1956–1982,” will bring together around 250 objects, including 40 from MoMA’s collection. The exhibition is curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, a painting and sculpture curator who also leads the Africa group of the museum’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) initiative, with Erica DiBenedetto, a former curatorial associate of painting and sculpture.

The focal point of the exhibition is the term “emancipatory art” between the years 1956 and 1982, which Nzwei characterized in an interview as “a moment of great transformation and change around the world, especially in Africa” where discussions focused on “political independence—the argument of that period was around liberation or emancipation. Artists in Africa were making works that were in the spirit of the change that was in air.”

In thinking about that period of history critically as a moment of decolonization, Nwezi said raises the question of “How might we understand the relationship between political change that was happening and artists who were also part of that change and how they were responding to that? In other words, how were artists creating an aesthetic that lent itself to decolonization? That’s how we arrived at ‘emancipatory art.’”

He added, “This is an opportunity for us to find a visual and art historical language to help describe that moment.”

The 26-year span of the exhibition, Nzwei said, is also intentional. While 1960 is often considered “The Year of Africa” because 17 countries on the continent achieved independence that year, “political independence was not achieved in one fell swoop in Africa,” he said, pointing to countries like Morocco, Tunisia, and Sudan achieving political independence in 1956, while Zimbabwe did not achieve political independence from white rule until 1980.

Nzewi first started thinking about the exhibition shortly after joining MoMA in 2019, when he began to realize the museum’s history in being at the forefront of engaging with African modernism in the 1960s, beginning with the acquisition of Sam Ntiro’s 1956 painting Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night in 1960. “MoMA was the first institution in the US, if not the Western world, that was really interested in modern African art, and at some point, we went along collecting this work,” he said. “MoMA’s relationship with Africa is really from the moment of independence.”

Highlighted in the exhibition are the conferences and festivals that took place at this time, including the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, which Alioune Diop, the publisher of the journal Présence Africaine, created to gather Black intellectuals after attending the Bandung Conference in Indonesia the previous year. In anticipation of African political independence, according to Nzwei, attendees discussed questions like, What would be be Africa’s contribution to cultural modernity?

A second Congress in Rome in 1959 would catalyze similar events in Africa, five of which will be discussed in the exhibition, such as the International Congress of African Culture in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) in 1962, which MoMA founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who had advocated for the acquisition of Ntiro’s painting, attended, as well as the First World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966 in Dakar, Senegal and the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969.

“An important argument the show makes,” Nzwei said, “is that emancipatory art, especially in that moment, can be understood as emerging at the intersection of national aspiration and nation building and Black solidarity. Artists had a vision for new nations, but that vision artists had for their individual countries was also in dialog with the spirit of Pan-Africanism that was on the continent and beyond.”

Among the highlights of the exhibition is Mozambican artist Valente Malangatana’s 1973 Cry of Freedom (O Grito da Liberdade), which was shown at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (better known as FESTAC ’77) in Lagos. The painting, now owned by MoMA, shows a mélange of people—soldiers, civilians, field workers—and animals, as well as daggers.

“It’s a very surrealistic picture,” Nzwei said, characterizing the work as one of the exhibition’s lodestars. “The language in the work is definitely political and very decolonial. It’s speaking the vocabulary that describes artistic aspirations in Mozambique when Mozambique was under colonial domination. The rhetoric of emancipation, the rhetoric of liberation was something that [almost] every artist was interested in.”

While the focus of this exhibition is on emancipatory art as it relates to the African continent and its diaspora, Nzwei said he believes this is a term that can be expanded more broadly to think about similar movements in Asia, Latin American, and Eastern Europe. Artists working in these different geographical contexts were often engaged in “the language of liberation, the language of colonization, the language of emancipation,” he said, noting that emancipatory art also aims to define “the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and cultural aspirations that happened at that moment. … Emancipatory art takes into account the deep experiences and aspirations of artists in Africa but also beyond Africa—to artists in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.”

Nzwei said he hopes the exhibition will not only align with MoMA’s recent efforts to present “a more global narrative of art history, and specifically Africa’s participation in that narrative” but that it might ultimately redefine “our understanding mid-century modernism.”

When thinking about the exhibition’s focus more broadly, “you realize that emancipatory art really is the most definitive way to understand modernism of the mid-century beyond movements that are well-established like Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Minimalism,” Nzwei said. “I think the biggest art historical impact that I expect this exhibition to make is to help us further understand the different threads of modern art that we don’t yet fully grasp [and] to find a different way of understanding mid-century modernism beyond the way is currently being discussed—but from the perspective of Africa.”