In December 1980, the exiled African Brazilian artist and scholar Abdias do Nascimento laid out the ideas that had underpinned his life’s work. An anti-racist, Black-rights activist since he was a 15-year-old witnessing São Paulo’s largely white police force constantly harassing his peers, he wanted to emphasise, he said, “the urgent need of the Brazilian Black people to win back their memory”.
The essay was titled “Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative”. It called for resistance against centuries of dehumanising, dogmatic Eurocentrism in terms that would resonate with communities, activists and entire peoples throughout the world.
Along with Garveyism and Négritude, Nascimento’s Quilombismo is one of the three foundational Black liberation movements to be celebrated in the exhibition Project a Black Planet: the Art and Culture of Panafrica, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Spanning 12 galleries, viewers are taken thorough an exhilarating exploration of what Pan-Africanism means and, most crucially, has meant to artists.
Beauford Delaney’s Self-Portrait in a Paris Bath House (1971) © The Estate of Beauford Delaney
For more than a century, this term has taken hold throughout Africa, South America, the US, the Caribbean and beyond. From Black Internationalism to Afro-Modernity and Afropolitanism, it is, as the show’s co-curator Antawan I. Byrd puts it, “a complex terrain”. It is both an idea and an aesthetic.
With its play on “projection” (of a film or an imagined future) and “project” (a plan in progress), the title of the show suggests a push and pull between idealism and activism. “There is a utopianism at the core of Pan-Africanism’s ambition for global unity, co-operation and equity,” Byrd says. “Yet, as we know, utopian thinking can catalyse a range of creative activities and forms of activism. The experience of the exhibition is such that visitors are called to shuttle between the ideal and the real.”
The show includes works by the American Modernist Beauford Delaney and the British contemporary painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Among the 350 objects are works made in the midst of political activism (the Mozambican artist Malangatana Ngwenya’s prison drawings) and others that resonate with what Nascimento, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon and other central thinkers proposed. Among these are Chris Ofili’s Union Black (2003), which replaces the colours of the British flag with the red, green and black of the Pan-African tricolour, and Kerry James Marshall’s wall piece Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra) (2003), which reconfigures the map of Africa as a charm-filled latex and plywood bas-relief.
The exhibition marks the finale of the year-long Panafrica Across Chicago season. Since hosting the Congress on Africa in 1893, the windy city has played a vital role not just in birthing Pan-Africanism but keeping it alive. And Chicagoans are on board. “The response has been incredible,” Byrd says. “There’s much enthusiasm all around.”
• Project a Black Planet: the Art and Culture of Panafrica, Art Institute of Chicago, 15 December-30 March 2025
