MoMA - Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination
Sun, Dec 14
|MoMA
Explore how photography helped shape Pan-African identity. Ideas of Africa at MoMA is a riveting look at portraiture, politics, and possibility.
Time & Location
Dec 14, 2025, 7:00 AM – Jul 25, 2026, 10:50 PM
MoMA, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA
About the event
December 14, 2025 – July 25, 2026
MoMA, Floor 2, 2 South – The Paul J. Sachs Galleries
Visit MoMA.org
Can a photograph do more than capture a face—can it inspire a movement? Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination examines how the lens of portrait photography helped ignite Pan-African ideals during the transformational decades of the mid-20th century. Featuring iconic images from Central and West Africa, this exhibition positions portraiture as both an artistic and political act.
Explore bold, radiant photographs from Jean Depara, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, and Sanlé Sory, who documented the style, spirit, and societal changes taking place in Bamako, Kinshasa, and Bobo-Dioulasso. These portraits—of everyday citizens, artists, and youth—resonate with the postcolonial optimism and political awakening that paralleled the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
The show expands to include the diasporic perspectives of James Barnor and Kwame Brathwaite, whose work in London and New York…