CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/12/2026

Pan-African possibility in 'Ideas of Africa'

Featuring more than 100 artists working from the mid-twentieth century to today—covering decolonialization and the civil rights period across the Diaspora—Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination is an essential examination of the role of portrait photography in the construction of Africa as a political idea. But “Ideas of Africa dispenses with the burden of representation that dominates the popular discourse about the African continent,” MoMA curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo writes, instead highlighting “the full range of creative capacity embedded within the photographic process. … What remains undertheorized in the public sphere—and particularly suited to curatorial forms of meaning-making—is the treatment of political imagination through photographic portraiture. As such, this exhibition aims to unfix the portrait as solely an index of identity. With this approach, Ideas of Africa is indebted to the work of Jennifer Bajorek, who argues that, in the case of city dwellers in Dakar and Bamako, ‘Africans’ embrace of photography was a key factor in expanding the existing spaces of political imagination . . . . [I]n the middle decades of the twentieth century, west Africans took full advantage of this expanded imaginative field. They used photography to open new routes and relays of communication; they creatively exploited its infinite capacities for recirculation and resignification; and they used its remarkable plasticity, lack of fixity, and aesthetic and referential open-endedness to reimagine, and remake, their world.” As we continue to witness transformative shifts in the global geopolitical order, it is useful to revisit a moment in history that saw the disintegration of colonial territories and the formation of transnational solidarity across the African continent and the African Diaspora. Ideas of Africa locates dazzling modes of Pan-African possibility in images made by inventive photographers who registered and beckoned new worlds.”