Global Transmissions

FLANKING THE ENTRANCE to the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” were two wood figures: Wangechi Mutu’s Tree Woman, 2016,and Oxóssi, 1960, by Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos. Though painted decades apart, both sculptures embody shared impulses that surfaced repeatedly throughout this wide-ranging show: an effort to assimilate a classical sculptural vocabulary—in this case, that of the Central African power figure—and an attempt to reimagine the human form in ways that encode messages of possibility, solidarity, and resistance. Curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Adom Getachew, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, the exhibition brought together dozens of historically significant paintings and sculptures for the first time, a rich array of 350 objects from around the world. Chicago itself took center stage, as the show’s festival-like run included events across the city through the spring. The show’s size and scope were thrilling, like nothing we had seen since Okwui Enwezor’s watershed 2002 presentation “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which the curators cited as their “most imposing precedent.”¹

Pan-Africanism encompasses cultural, political, and artistic movements spanning Europe, America, Africa, and Latin America that aimed at unifying people of African descent around shared objectives. Its formal origins trace to 1900, when Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams convened the first Pan-African Congress in London; several additional conferences followed, organized by W. E. B. Du Bois. Those gatherings anchored the rapid development of Black visual art, music, dance, literature, and political action. As the exhibition illustrated, Pan-Africanism also corresponded with urgent anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and civil rights movements worldwide. In the time frame covered by “Project a Black Planet,” Pan-Africanism’s adherents—aided by the expansion of air travel—sought to foster dialogue through new modernist media, including magazines, journals, records, fashion, painting, and sculpture, which served as vessels for the transmission of a message of unity across borders and time zones. In an example of what catalogue contributor Tsitsi Ella Jaji has elsewhere called “stereomodernism,” the exhibition included records, video installation, sound recordings (what a thrill to hear Audre Lorde’s voice in the gallery!), and a sound art installation.² Indeed, as Pan-Africanism attempted to capture the world’s attention—stratifying and multiplying across the space and decades of modernism—new media, with its possibility for amplification and electronic transmission, proved essential. That’s what came to my mind as I looked at Kader Attia’s Asesinos! Asesinos! (Assassins! Assassins!), 2014, an installation of reclaimed doors with megaphones assembled as a crowd. Pan-Africanism was built in relation to a broader sensorium than the visual, and cannot be grasped along the visual/conceptual axis alone.

As Pan-Africanism attempted to capture the world’s attention—stratifying and multiplying across the space and decades of modernism—new media, with its possibility for amplification and electronic transmission, proved essential.

A film series did some of the work of projection. Running from August 2024 to January 2025, it featured five films spanning the 1960s to the present, including Sarah Maldoror’s groundbreaking wrong: Monangambééé (1968), Larry Achiampong’s Relic Traveller: Phase 1 (2017), and newer works such as Mónica de Miranda’s Path to the Stars (2022). The mix of contemporary and historical films emphasized how contemporary filmmakers continue to engage with the watershed period of the ’50s and ’60s, when decolonization movements and civil rights struggles led to unprecedented achievements in national sovereignty and cultural recognition, while simultaneously nurturing visions of Black global connectedness that suggest the vibrancy of the Pan-Africanist project. 

Pan-African discourse was split among three subgroups within the exhibition, represented by the linguistically disparate intellectual traditions of Garveyism, Négritude, and Quilombismo. The first of these, emerging out of the Anglophone networks of Du Bois and Williams, was named after Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, whose “Back to Africa” movement included the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) established in 1914. Négritude, or “Blackness,” was a literary movement founded in ’30s Paris by African and Caribbean students and intellectuals, such as Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Paulette and Jean Nardal, and that served as the official cultural program of Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor. Finally, Quilombismo is named for Brazilian artist and scholar Abdias Nascimento’s 1980 term derived from the quilombo communities of formerly enslaved Brazilians—a Lusophone Black solidarity movement frequently left out of accounts of the Pan-African project. The first three galleries explored the movements as thematic anchors rather than as historical periods or in relation to geographical origins. This framework then expanded through five conceptual lenses in additional galleries respectively labeled “Interiors,” “Blackness,” “Circulation,” “Agitation,” and “Interdependence.”

MOTIFS, OR “AFROTROPES”

So how does one begin to make sense of this exhibition—which addressed a broad geographic and temporal span and included a broad and diverse arrangement of objects and artworks? One answer comes via art historians Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, who in the past decade have proposed a new method for theorizing Black art. Their approach centers on the Afrotrope, a coinage for, as they put it, “those recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity.” As examples, they cite the slave ship icon from 1788 by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, South African photographer Sam Nzima’s 1976 photograph of Hector Pieterson’s murdered body in Soweto, and the i am a man signs held by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968. The Afrotrope is a spatiotemporally mobile visual referent, a type of call-and-response structure and cultural coding that takes flight from historical specificity, detaching and circulating in a play of forms, especially with increased mechanical (and digital) reproduction.³ The Afrotrope is to contemporary art as the motif is to modernism, and the exhibition mapped them together. In the first rooms of “Project a Black Planet,” the chronologically earliest, classical Pan-African works by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Papa Ibra Tall, Malvin Gray Johnson, and others displayed what Elizabeth Harney calls “recognizable pan-African motifs—masks, carved statues, and incised combs—ironically, all conventional signs of l’art primitive,highly valued by European primitivist collectors.”⁴ The work of flattening out three-dimensional sculpture into a two-dimensional painting was analogous to intellectualizing and abstracting Blackness as media became more mobile in the early twentieth century. Through the Afrotrope framework, we can now recognize this translation as a deliberate visual strategy that enabled resistance through circulation. The motifs in these works became instruments of what Gayatri Spivak later called “strategic essentialism”—for instance, the flattened and ethnically ambiguous masks in paintings such as Palmer Hayden’s Fétiche et Fleurs, 1932/1933, and Ben Enwonwu’s 1948 Still Life depicting figures in an ancestral shrine. These two early examples of Pan-African cultural production, when read via the Afrotrope, reveal themselves not as naive primitivism but as sophisticated visual arguments operating along the aesthetic trajectory established by Fuller’s maquette for her famous sculpture Ethiopia Rising, 1921, which depicts a female figure ascending out of her funerary wrappings with a pharaonic headdress—considered the first Pan-African artwork.

Ensuing galleries moved more firmly into the domain of the Afrotrope, as embodied for example in the diagram of slave ship cargo in Malcolm Bailey’s Untitled, 1969, an acrylic painting rendered to appear like a botanist’s cyanotype.⁵ The tricolor flag of Garveyism was featured in such now-iconic works as David Hammons’s African American Flag, 1990. The contour line of Africa’s continental margin appeared repeatedly, as in Kerry James Marshall’s Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra), 2003; Dana C. Chandler’s print Pan-African Man, 1970; a cover of Ebony from 1976; a 1970 AfriCOBRA exhibition poster; Dread Scott’s All African People’s Community Passport, 2024; and Mwangi Hutter’s Static Drift, 2001. The journey of the mask of Queen Mother Idia through Pan-African visual culture was notable: First featured on publications for the First World Festival of Black Arts (fesman) in 1966 because of its disputed ownership by the British Museum via the British Punitive Expedition of 1879, it achieved widespread recognition as the symbol of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (festac) in 1977 and appeared in a 1969 collage by Romare Bearden. As Byrd argues, the mask’s widespread reproduction served a dual purpose, simultaneously celebrating West Africa’s artistic heritage while highlighting the ongoing legacy of European colonial plunder.⁶

The exhibition included contemporary works that reflexively document the process of images becoming tropes. In the “Garveyism” gallery, visitors found a 1924 James Van Der Zee photograph of activist and critic Kojo Tovalou-Houénou seated between Garvey and UNIA deputy potentate George O. Marke. Beside it hung Tavares Strachan’s Kojo, 2021, a painting with a collage-like array of visual ephemera, including a flag of Ethiopia, a crosshairs, and an image of Houénou drawn from Van Der Zee’s photo. By emphasizing Strachan’s assimilation of the photo into his painting, the curators underscored the crucial role of reproductive technologies in the dissemination and projection of Pan-African ideology and ideas. As Musab Younis argues in the catalogue, “photographs and flags were both essential to Garveyite aesthetics.”⁷ 

 “Project a Black Planet” found us in a rapidly evolving geopolitical situation shaped by constant mobility and connectivity that at once facilitates great acts of unity and unparalleled tribalism and nationalism.

Quilombismowas called upon to vastly expand the set of references associated with Pan-Africanism. In the catalogue, Witkovsky categorizes Quilombismo as a secessionist strain of Pan-Africanism, which is one way to characterize its deliberate opacity and visual systems meant to be legible only to those within specific communities. Nascimento acted as the bridge from this enclave’s set of practices to international Pan-Africanism, using the tricolor flag in Simbiose Africana no. 3, 1973, as backdrop to Candomblé and Afro-Brazilian symbols such as a serpent eating its tail and the quartered circle. Some of this work thus possessed religious potency akin to dos Santos’s power figure in the entrance of the exhibit, protected as sacred knowledge by generations of enslaved Africans taken to South America. Modernism is troubled by such belief, or metaphysics, as well as by cultural coding, the presence of something so local that it threatens to undermine universalism. The “sacred geometry” in Nascimento’s paintings is both culturally specific and a product of global modernism. The exhibition relied on a brief window of those symbols being extrapolated into the larger struggle for emancipation and, in particular, on Nascimento’s own thesis in “O Quilombismo” (1980).

The penultimate gallery contained a tiered display that served as a powerful culmination of the exhibition’s exploration of Pan-African tropes/motifs and, in particular, their relationship to abstraction and figuration. A presentation of sculptural works from various locations and time periods, including the twenty-first century, this installation reasserted the mask’s physical presence, affirming its status not merely as a figure in Pan-Africanism’s strategic visual vocabulary but as a classical African form. Central to the grouping was Simone Leigh’s raffia mask Dunham, 2017, an homage to Katherine Dunham, the well-known dancer and anthropologist who, in inverting the basic tenets of anthropology, collapsed the distance between herself and her “research subjects.”⁸ Leigh’s treatment of the masquerade likewise dissolves distinctions between subject and object: An encrusted head sans face atop a raffia dome functions neither as a fully articulated human form nor as an abstract sculpture. The work is neither represented subject nor literal object, resisting categorization as either “someone” or “something.” 

ABSTRACTION AND FIGURATION 

Leigh’s Dunham is an example of “midpoint mimesis,” as Robert Farris Thompson once called such an approach, which is also found in the “moderation of resemblance” in Yoruba aesthetics.⁹ Midpoint mimesis was also taken up by artists associated with AfriCOBRA, the Chicago-based artist collective started in the ’60s, for whom the aesthetic was a style or “vibe” that sat between popular and fine, graphical and painterly, “objective and non-objective.”¹⁰ The particular deployment of “midpoint mimesis” could have profound political implications. Take, for instance, the examples of Iba N’Diaye and Papa Ibra Tall, two leading Senegalese painters who worked during the Négritude movement under Senghor’s influence at the École de Dakar. In Chicago, Tall’s Le guerrier (The Warrior), 1964, employed precisely rendered force lines and dynamic human abstractions, the canvas organized by graphic rather than painterly lines. Several galleries away, a pair of paintings by Tall’s aesthetic antagonist, N’Diaye—La femme qui pleure (The Woman Who Cries) and La femme qui hurle (The Woman Who Screams), both 1986—were supple and richly textured, displaying gestural brush marks and drips with a force that was emotional instead of graphical. Given the twenty years separating the work by Tall and those by N’Diaye, the exhibition grouped them under two different themes from two periods of postcolonial nationalism in Africa—yet the pair of artists were also contemporaries who fiercely debated the reigning discourse of Négritude and Africanité generally. One can see in their work a working out of the terms of their global artistic identities in these debates: For Tall, the onus on the artist was to reject the colonial dichotomy of traditional and contemporary and to produce recognizable forms translated through the vocabulary of pattern and texture rather than naturalistic rendering, another feature of midpoint mimesis. For N’Diaye, no such return was possible, only a hybridization of influences in an individual shaping of artistic vision, akin to that which he admired in jazz music. 

Thus, questions about the supposed categorical purity of race were coterminous with that of form. The curators explored this dynamic in the gallery devoted to Blackness, where viewers found Marlene Dumas’s painting Albino, 1986, next to Rasheed Araeen’s abstract latticelike hanging sculpture Punj Neelay (Five Blues), 1970. These two works speak to the fundamental problems of representation posed by non-Black artists who identified with the political aims of Pan-Africanism: Dumas, a white South African artist, paints a Black African albino, described by Sandrine Colard in the catalogue as one of apartheid’s “most disruptive subjects,”¹¹ while the Karachi-born Araeen made geometric minimalism that his British audiences refused to see as anything but “Islamic” art.¹² Later, Araeen would join the British arm of the Black Panthers and make a foray into more pointedly political art, as in his performance Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person), 1977. 

The work of flattening out three-dimensional sculpture into a two-dimensional painting was analogous to intellectualizing and abstracting Blackness as media became more mobile in the early twentieth century.

The struggle to characterize figuration and abstraction in a global context also concerns artists like Ibrahim El-Salahi, who linked his practice of abstraction directly with Sufism.¹³ Included in the exhibition was Funeral and the Crescent, 1963, a significant work produced to commemorate the assassination of the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. El-Salahi was a major figure in the Khartoum School in Sudan and participated in “calligraphic modernism,” a key aspect of Arab Modern art.¹⁴ His process of abstraction, during the time he painted Funeral, consisted of manipulating the shapes of Arabic calligraphy to test the boundaries of representation, or the linguistic aspects of abstraction and figuration. This investigation included the study of the sound of language in relation to its visual aspects—the chanting of prayers for the dying, for instance. Iftikhar Dadi argues that “for modernist Arab artists, the word hurufiyyah (from the Arabic letter, harf), which already carried an intellectual, esoteric, and Sufi charge, was now invested with a new connotation of formal abstraction. . . .”¹⁵ El-Salahi’s work appeared in the 1966 fesman and he attended a workshop at the Mbari Artist and Writers Club in Ibadan, Nigeria, in the 1960s. 

MOBILITY

The show throughout explored how transportation infrastructure became central to Pan-African visions of economic and cultural independence. This theme emerged through artifacts like the passport issued by Scott’s All African People’s Consulate and stock notes from the Black Star Line, a shipping company established by Garvey in 1918 to facilitate commerce and transportation throughout the Americas and Caribbean. In founding the company, Garvey underscored his clear position on economic mobility: Unless Africans and their descendants established their own means of production and consumption, they would remain excluded from multinational financial networks. The significance of this infrastructure was captured by William Greaves in his documentary about fesman, which documents the arrival of Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, in Dakar—a moment that, as Tobias Wofford has noted, inspires religious reverence among Rastafarians thanks to the anti-colonial undertones of Selassie harnessing the most advanced technologies of the day.¹⁶ Yet if the twentienth century heralded a new period of mobility and connection, that corresponded with the pernicious retrenchment of division. As Sophia Azeb describes in her catalogue essay, when Kathleen Neal Cleaver, an American Black Panther, visited the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969, she was shocked by the cultural fragmentation she encountered. As Azeb puts it, “The complicated tribal and ethnic divisions among Arabs, Berbers, and Africans bewildered Panthers accustomed to simple stratifications of color and class.”¹⁷

That is precisely where “Project a Black Planet” found us: in a rapidly evolving geopolitical situation shaped by constant mobility and connectivity that at once facilitates great acts of unity and unparalleled tribalism and nationalism. Thus, the fact that the show culminated in a celebration of queerness and “interdependence” was an audacious move given the state of things in the United States and on the African continent. One can argue that nation-states that have outlawed homosexual behavior are scapegoating queer folks to distract an underserved public. One could also argue (as reactionary African politicians and religious figures routinely have) that homosexuality is a category invented by the West and imposed on Africans. To project a Black and queer planet is an exercise in envisioning the world that you want to see, that we ought to see, albeit one that does not pervasively exist now. One hopes, that is, that this curatorial gesture and the artworks included have eventual bearing on the de jure and de facto discrimination against queer Africans in almost every country on the continent, and at least as many outside of Africa.