FLANKING THE ENTRANCE to the Art Institute of Chicago’s Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica were two wood figures: Wangechi Mutu’s Tree Woman, 2016,and Oxóssi, 1960, by Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos. Though painted decades apart, both sculptures embody shared impulses that surfaced repeatedly throughout this wide-ranging show: an effort to assimilate a classical sculptural vocabulary—in this case, that of the Central African power figure—and an attempt to reimagine the human form in ways that encode messages of possibility, solidarity, and resistance. Curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Adom Getachew, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, the exhibition brought together dozens of historically significant paintings and sculptures for the first time, a rich array of 350 objects from around the world. Chicago itself took center stage, as the show’s festival-like run included events across the city through the spring. The show’s size and scope were thrilling, like nothing we had seen since Okwui Enwezor’s watershed 2002 presentation “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which the curators cited as their “most imposing precedent.” [...]
[...] Ensuing galleries moved more firmly into the domain of the Afrotrope, as embodied for example in the diagram of slave ship cargo in Malcolm Bailey’s Untitled, 1969, an acrylic painting rendered to appear like a botanist’s cyanotype.5 The tricolor flag of Garveyism was featured in such now-iconic works as David Hammons’s African American Flag, 1990. The contour line of Africa’s continental margin appeared repeatedly, as in Kerry James Marshall’s Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra), 2003; Dana C. Chandler’s print Pan-African Man, 1970; a cover of Ebony from 1976; a 1970 AfriCOBRA exhibition poster; Dread Scott’s All African People’s Community Passport, 2024; and Mwangi Hutter’s Static Drift, 2001. The journey of the mask of Queen Mother Idia through Pan-African visual culture was notable: First featured on publications for the First World Festival of Black Arts (fesman) in 1966 because of its disputed ownership by the British Museum via the British Punitive Expedition of 1879, it achieved widespread recognition as the symbol of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (festac) in 1977 and appeared in a 1969 collage by Romare Bearden. As Byrd argues, the mask’s widespread reproduction served a dual purpose, simultaneously celebrating West Africa’s artistic heritage while highlighting the ongoing legacy of European colonial plunder.
