Ideas of Africa: Portraitureand Political Imagination

At MoMA Exhibitions, *Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination* traces how artists have used portraiture to think through power, identity, and the competing stories attached to “Africa” in modern and contemporary culture. The show reads faces, poses, and photographic conventions as political language, shaped by colonial archives and remade by self-representation. In New York, that framing carries particular weight, given the city’s outsized role in circulating images through museums, media, and markets. One clear takeaway is how quickly a portrait can slip from likeness into argument.