Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator in The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, reflects on archives, authorship, and Pan-African imagination in Ideas of Africa.
Oumar Ka, Untitled (Two Women with Thatched Roof House), 1959–68. Gelatin silver print, printed 2024, 43.2 x 43.2cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi in honour of Darren Walker. © Oumar Ka Estate, courtesy Axis Gallery, NY
‘Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination’ opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as a focused examination of photographic portraiture as a site where political consciousness, self-fashioning, and Pan-African subjectivity took visual form. The exhibition considers how images produced across Africa and the African diaspora during the mid-twentieth century participated in a transatlantic dialogue shaped by decolonisation movements and the Civil Rights era. Drawing on works from the landmark 2019 gift of modern and contemporary African art from Jean Pigozzi, alongside recent acquisitions and key loans, the exhibition resists reading portraiture as a transparent record of identity. Instead, it foregrounds questions of collaboration, circulation, and interpretation, asking how sitters and photographers negotiated representation during a period of profound political and cultural transformation. In this conversation, Oluremi C. Onabanjo discusses navigating archival silences, rethinking influence as interaction rather than hierarchy, and using the conceptual elasticity of the Long 1960s to situate African photographic practices within global histories of modern and contemporary art.
Installation view, ‘Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination’, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from December 14, 2025, through July 25, 2026. Photo by Jonathan Dorado © The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ART AFRICA: When researching the exhibition, how did you navigate the archival gaps and silences that shape mid-century African portraiture?
Oluremi C. Onabanjo: ‘Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination‘ (2025–26) is the third of three exhibitions that celebrate the transformative 2019 gift of modern and contemporary African art from Jean Pigozzi, following ‘Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams‘ (2018) and ‘Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound‘ (2022), respectively. The starting point for the exhibition—responding to a set of photographs—positioned my relationship to archival aporias differently. While there may be limits to what one can immediately know when dealing with mid-century African photographic portraits (as well as portraits of people in other regions), these forms of interpretive tension encourage a productive sharpening of visual literacy.
As I learned from the Study Sessions we organised leading up to the exhibition, by articulating what we know and what we don’t know, we can begin to ask better questions about whom we are looking at, rather than taking the photographic portrait as a static document or transparent index of identity. Who were these people, and what were their experiences? How did they imagine themselves, and what was their relationship to the person behind the lens? How was this picture constructed, negotiated, or collaboratively created? How did these photographs circulate in the world?
With this exhibition, I aimed to do some foundational groundwork within the specific institutional context of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Spotlighting incredible works from the Pigozzi gift, ‘Ideas of Africa’ puts these pictures in dialogue with other key acquisitions—demonstrating what a gift has the potential to make possible in terms of enlivening a museum collection. At its core, the exhibition shows viewers that are new to this material why it is vital for them to engage histories of photographic portraiture on the African continent and across the Diaspora (wherein New York is a key site), while hopefully bringing a novel, dynamic interpretive lens to those that already know these incredible image-makers well and love what they do on the picture plane. Ultimately, I’d like for this to be the first of many shows to engage substantively with these works in the Museum’s collection, and to be among many exhibitions at MoMA to argue for the necessity of regarding the African continent and Diaspora within stories of modern and contemporary art.
Sanlé Sory, Le Voyageur (The Traveler), 1970–85. Gelatin silver print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Photography Fund. © 2025 Sanlé Sory, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.
What forms of cross-regional influence in photographic practice were most complex to trace, and how did you determine when they meaningfully shaped a portrait’s politics?
I was less interested in tracing forms of cross-regional influence (i.e. an implicitly vertical or hierarchical relationship of diffusion), and more interested in forms of cross-regional interaction—where specific experiences of everyday life during mid-twentieth century liberation movements functioned in relation to the lateral circulation of pan-African ideas across space and time. Movement is key, and undoubtedly political.
In this context, sensitivity to photographers active across both Anglophone and Francophone West and Central Africa proved just as important as thinking across the Atlantic, in order to trace currents across linguistic bounds alongside geographic expanses. For example, thinking through the politics and performance of beauty in the work of Kwame Brathwaite and James Barnor generates something really unexpected when set in relation to a portrait by Jean Depara, or a consideration of Seydou Keïta’s longstanding investment in presentation. Being sensitive to the transmission of music also helped.
Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs), 1964–68. Inkjet print, printed 2018. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Photography Fund. © 2025 Kwame Brathwaite
How did Mudimbe’s thinking influence your approach to presenting these portraits within a museum context, especially around authorship and interpretation?
When I first began working on this exhibition, ‘The Idea of Africa’ (1994) was approaching its thirtieth anniversary, which occasioned revisiting the text and its crucial arguments. While re-reading, I was struck by the curatorial potential of building on the book’s critical deconstruction of “Africa” as a product of conflicting Western intellectual formations, and reflected on its reception at the initial moment of publication—also a watershed moment for the history of African photography in New York City. Among his many philosophical and historical lessons, I found that methodologically, Mudimbe taught me to be voraciously interdisciplinary in my interpretive sensibilities, and unapologetically expansive in my intellectual orientation towards forms of African authorship, subjectivity, and self-determination.
Installation view, ‘Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination’, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from December 14, 2025, through July 25, 2026. Photo by Jonathan Dorado © The Museum of Modern Art, New York
What challenges did you encounter when reconstructing the contributions of women photographers such as Felicia Abban, and how did this shape the exhibition narrative?
Exhibition making is just one part of curatorial practice—especially when one stewards a collection, as I do at MoMA. Working in this way means that there are timelines that exceed the lifespan of a single show. I hope to make moves that will impact generations of exhibitions and cast greater light on the contribution of women artists to the history of photography. In the case of Felicia Abban (1936–2024), the challenge was thinking through how best to honour her work, while engaging with her Estate at a moment when her family was deeply grieving her passing. Therefore, while Abban’s work is not featured in Ideas of Africa, the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition is dedicated to her memory (alongside that of Koyo Kouoh, 1967–2025), and Abban plays a key role in my own essay therein.
How did you decide on the temporal boundaries of the Long 1960s, and were there materials you chose to exclude in order to preserve the exhibition’s focus?
When the starting point for an exhibition is the photographic object, one looks for compelling interpretive frames that will help to ground viewers as they look. While compiling the checklist and working through secondary literature, I found the historical notion of “The Long 1960s” to be a particularly generative conceptually—that elastic decade of transformative change within what the late Okwui Enwezor has termed ‘A Short Century‘ of social upheaval. It really helped me in thinking across space and time. Inevitably, practical constraints (such as gallery space) require leaving work out, but that also encourages a kind of creativity. The possibilities with these artists and histories are boundless, and I hope this exhibition invites others to join and expand on this ongoing conversation.
Malick Sidibé, Regardez-moi! (Look at Me!), 1962. Gelatin silver print, printed 2003. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jean Pigozzi. © 2025 Malick Sidibé. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
What criteria helped you identify when contemporary works, such as those by Fosso and Rosi (not Rosy), entered an actual critical dialogue with the modernist archive rather than referencing it stylistically?
The impetus for including contemporary work in this exhibition was to actively demonstrate how these histories of photographic portraiture are not static or bounded. When it came to including these artists, I spent a great deal of time looking at and reading about various bodies of work. I had many conversations and studio visits with the aim of understanding what motivates these artists’ practices and grappled with what animates their formal and conceptual commitments. When I encountered work that was not only self-aware formally, but also historically and socio-politically attentive, it felt important to include it. Indeed, when I kept learning from a picture, when I kept returning to it, and thinking about how this artist’s work enlivened and enriched my understanding of the exhibition’s emergent themes—that’s when I felt it could offer something to a visitor. That’s when it went on the checklist, and ultimately the wall.
‘Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination’ is on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, through July 25, 2026.
