Five years in the making, Project a Black Planet, the groundbreaking exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, explores the visual arts and culture at the heart of Pan-Africanism—the intellectual, political and social movements that imagined and championed a collective liberatory future for all people of African descent across the globe.
Project a Black Planet offers many firsts. It is the first major exhibition to survey the art and culture of Pan-Africanism, doing so through more than 350 objects—paintings, prints, sculpture, film, magazines, music, speeches and sound of all kinds—dating from the late 1910s to today, by artists and creatives from Africa, Europe, North and South America. By claiming visual arts and popular culture as the “force” that drives Pan-Africanism, the show also offers a corrective to previous interpretations of the movement.
Adom Getachew, a professor at the University of Chicago, one of the curators of the exhibition, says “The topic and question of Pan-Africanism has largely been thought of in terms of a political history, sometimes a literary history, but never really through the visual. So this was an opportunity to tell that story in a way that hasn’t been done before.” [...]
[...] The journey through the vitrines starts in 1903 but winds its way to now. One of the treasures in the cases is a passport, from the artist Dread Scott’s All African People’s Consulate, a Pan-African, Afrofuturist art project made as part of this year’s Venice Biennale. Via this space, people can literally follow the steps of a typical consular journey, including making an appointment to be interviewed and receiving their entry documents—for citizenship if of African descent or a visa if not—to a “futurist, globalist community,” a free state of African communities. A description of the project characterizes it as an “act of inversion,” focused on embracing rather than denying the movement of people and further proposes “What if, instead of being seen as a place to escape from, there was an African community of nations which was a magnet, a refuge from colonialism and oppression, a destination for immigration and visitation?”
That question and the overall concept of Dread Scott’s project tie directly back to some of the historic and foundational ideologies explored in Project a Black Planet, ones that also illuminate the reach of Pan-Africanism. Alongside the gallery on Garveyism in the United States and Caribbean, there are two additional galleries that survey Negritude across francophone countries and Quilombismo in Brazil. In manifesting an alternative world for Black people, Getachew describes each as envisioning a different stance up against the world as is, whether escaping to a parallel African nation (Garveyism), claiming Africa’s place among other modern nations (Negritude) or creating an alternate, self-sufficient community (Quilombismo).
