Jonah Batambuze discussed The Hands of Gods with Stephan Rheeder for ART AFRICA ahead of its 2025 presentation in Wild at Art at Atelier Mondial in Basel. Combining a short film, sculptural installation and participatory elements, the work drew on the artist’s Black Ugandan–South Indian household. Batambuze described everyday gestures, shared meals and the left hand as ways to explore inherited knowledge and the relationship between personal memory and diasporic identity.
In an ART AFRICA interview, architect Glenn DeRoche described his collaboration with Amoako Boafo for I Do Not Come to You by Chance at Gagosian in London. A timber pavilion evoked the gathering place of Boafo’s childhood courtyard in Accra, while Nkyinkyim combined painting with Ghana-made woven and wooden elements. DeRoche explained how these interventions made community and memory part of the exhibition’s physical experience rather than simply providing a backdrop.
ART AFRICA published a gallery announcement about Tizta Berhanu’s Agape at Addis Fine Art in Addis Ababa. The exhibition explored enduring love through layered oil paintings whose overlapping figures retained individual expressions even in intimate groupings. The article connected Berhanu’s translucent colour and swirling brushwork to her use of models, photographs and found imagery, offering an account of how the Ethiopian painter constructs scenes of care, vulnerability and complicated human connection.
Larissa de Souza spoke to ART AFRICA about Faith Charm, her 2025 exhibition at Simões de Assis in São Paulo. The paintings connected memories of women in her family with experiences in Angola and Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions. Embroidery, beads, tiles and other domestic materials extended the figurative images into textured assemblages. De Souza described this material experimentation as a way to explore ancestry, oral transmission and the experiences of women across the African diaspora.
Alexis Peskine builds portraits from nails and gold leaf, drawing on Afro-Brazilian heritage, family craftsmanship and African spiritual references. Speaking to Global Voices, the Paris-born artist explains how a technique developed during his studies became a way to explore the African diaspora. The interview also follows his shift towards healing and nature in Forest Figures, the body of work shown at London’s October Gallery in 2024.
Alexandra M. Thomas’s Hyperallergic review examined the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth Catlett retrospective through the artist’s commitments to Black and Mexican liberation. Prints, sculpture and public works connected her representations of women’s labour to her participation in Mexico’s Taller de Gráfica Popular. Thomas emphasised the transnational exchanges and community relationships that shaped Catlett’s practice, treating political organising as integral to her artistic achievement.
Debra Brehmer’s Hyperallergic review of Nordic Utopia? at the Chazen Museum examined Black American artists who worked in Scandinavia. Paintings and objects associated with William H. Johnson, Herbert Gentry, Ronald Burns and Howard Smith complicated familiar accounts centred on Paris. Brehmer described the creative room afforded by migration while noting that the exhibition did not equate life abroad with an uncomplicated escape from racism.
Isa Farfan’s Hyperallergic report examined Kelli Morgan’s launch of the Black Artists Archive in Detroit in July 2024. Encounters with artist and educator Marian Stephens helped turn an exhibition research project into a wider effort to preserve overlooked artistic lineages. Alongside archives held in homes and studios, Morgan envisaged future curatorial and residency programmes supporting living communities outside traditional institutional structures.
Sarah Rose Sharp reported in Hyperallergic on Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Curated by Abel González Fernández, the exhibition revisited the artist-run space Charles McGee established in 1969 and its commitment to Black abstraction. By pairing foundational participants with later artists, including Elizabeth Youngblood and Gilda Snowden, the show treated that history as an ongoing artistic inheritance.
Published by ArtThrob from the catalogue for Igshaan Adams’s Weerhoud exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, Nkgopoleng Moloi’s essay examined movement as a source for material and spiritual exploration. It connected Adams’s work with dancers to his textile practice, questions of trauma and the body’s cultural inscriptions. The account located these experiments within community collaboration and Sufi thought, extending discussion of the artist beyond decorative readings of weaving.
Maya Pontone reported for Hyperallergic on a family-held portrait newly displayed at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Attributed to James Alexander Simpson and thought to depict Mary Ann Tritt Cassell, the 1839 painting may have been commissioned by her mother, Henrietta Steptoe, who had been enslaved. The reporting traced family provenance and curatorial research while preserving uncertainty around the sitter and commission.
Reviewing the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition for Hyperallergic, Zoë Hopkins highlighted both its international reach and its unresolved debates about Black representation. The 160-work presentation, curated by Denise Murrell, placed well-known figures alongside artists whose contributions had received less attention. Hopkins read its juxtapositions as evidence of artistic freedom, political disagreement and transatlantic exchange, rather than one unified style or obligation.
ART AFRICA reported on Passengers in Transit, a Venice Biennale collateral exhibition organised by the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. April Bey, Christa David, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Joana Choumali and Thandiwe Muriu explored belonging through interdisciplinary practices and archives. The curatorial framework connected Black women’s representation with cross-cultural identity, drawing on the right to opacity rather than asking difference to become easily legible.
Maya Pontone’s Hyperallergic report identified Grafton Tyler Brown’s western landscapes and María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s multipart Polaroid work among more than 300 Brooklyn Museum acquisitions, alongside works by Twins Seven Seven and Whitfield Lovell. Made between December 2022 and October 2023, the additions were intended to broaden American and international representation before a gallery reinstallation. The report documented collecting as an active revision of museum narratives, with Black American and Caribbean practices entering that institutional conversation.
Hyperallergic reported that María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Carolyn Lazard were among four visual artists receiving 2023 MacArthur Fellowships. Campos-Pons was recognised for multidisciplinary work connecting personal ancestry and wider diasporic histories; Lazard’s practice examined accessibility and institutional ableism through installation, video and sculpture. The unrestricted awards supported future work without a prescribed project, marking significant recognition for practices that challenge dominant accounts of bodies and belonging.
Maya Pontone reported for Hyperallergic on Now and Forever, Kerry James Marshall’s first stained-glass commission, unveiled at Washington National Cathedral on 23 September 2023. The paired windows depicted Black demonstrators carrying signs about fairness and justice. Parts of the earlier glass remained above the new windows, sustaining a dialogue between past and present. The work expanded his longstanding representation of Black American life into an architectural medium.
Hyperallergic·
James Barnor, photographed in 2019. His 2023 Detroit retrospective is not pictured.CPFGalerie · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Cropped
ART AFRICA announced James Barnor’s first United States retrospective at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The exhibition’s programme spanned Ghana and the African diaspora in Britain, tracing social change through portraiture, journalism and fashion, alongside plans to recreate the photographer’s early studio environment.
Reviewing Wangechi Mutu’s Intertwined for Hyperallergic, Hrag Vartanian argued that her recent sculptures brought the fragmented energies of her drawings and collages into new material forms. He praised her handling of scale and imaginative treatment of African and feminine power while questioning several installation choices. The review recorded a major survey as a moment of artistic development, not simply a retrospective celebration.
Irini Zervas’s Hyperallergic review examined the Americas Society’s first US solo exhibition of Arthur Bispo do Rosario. Seventy-one works demonstrated how the Afro-Brazilian artist transformed available fabrics, threads and found objects during decades of institutionalisation. Rather than reducing the work to biography, the review attended to banners, miniature objects and garments as intricate systems of memory, spiritual purpose and resistance to the erasure of an individual life.
ART AFRICA previewed the Museum of the African Diaspora’s presentation of Black Venus, curated by Aindrea Emelife. More than 45 contemporary works were set against archival representations reaching back to 1793, examining how Black women have reclaimed control over their images after centuries of fetishisation. Artists including Zanele Muholi, Carrie Mae Weems and Deana Lawson made the exhibition a cross-generational dialogue about agency rather than a catalogue of imposed stereotypes.
