Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination

The Museum of Modern Art announces Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, an exhibition that will showcase how photographic portraits fuel ideas of Pan-African subjectivity and solidarity. On view from December 14, 2025, through July 25, 2026, the exhibition considers the transatlantic call and response that constructed Africa as a political idea, due to the “winds of decolonial change” that swept the African continent in tandem with the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Ideas of Africa is the third exhibition to be organized at The Museum of Modern Art in celebration of the 2019 gift of modern and contemporary African art from prolific collector Jean Pigozzi. The exhibition will feature core works from this gift, alongside a selection of recent acquisitions and key loans.