A Pan-African Blockbuster Portrays the Continent as a Monolith

As African nations moved toward independence in the 20th century, competing ideas about nomenclature jockeyed for supremacy, employing terms like African,Black, Arab, and Afro(‑American, ‑Brazilian, ‑Caribbean, etc.) in an attempt to shape legible blocks of solidarity from diverse populations. Given that “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica”—on view at the Art Institute of Chicago and traveling to museums in Barcelona and Brussels—(PaBP) declares itself the “first major exhibition to survey Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations,” bringing together 350 objects ranging from fine art to material culture, I expected to see complex narratives on view, with Pan-African philosophies pushing against one another just as they had clashed with mainstream Western visions.

Instead, thematic galleries with little through line (Interiors, Agitation, Revenants, etc.) became fractured worlds, each feeling progressively tacked-on and disconnected. There is enormous benefit to rendering this who’s who of Black artists, but many seem to be displayed more for the artists’ status than their significance to the Panafrica narrative, such as Wangechi Mutu’s sculpture installed in the entryway niche, or Zanele Muholi’s self-portrait hanging awkwardly in the corner of the final gallery. “PaBP” falls prey to the more-is-more blockbuster model that flattens takeaways by oversimplifying concepts like “Blackness” or “Panafrica” across hundreds of disparate objects.

After passing through a reproduction of Hale Woodruff’s mural The Art of the Negro (1950–51) in the large gallery that served as the exhibition’s prelude and postlude, a small gallery invokes the Pan-African flag as a symbolof transnational racial solidarity, with artworks by David Hammons and Chris Ofili. From there, three large galleries unpack three core Pan-African philosophies: Garveyism, Négritude, and Quilombismo. The artworks presented to illustrate Pan-African ideals left more questions than answers: What tenets were vital for stakeholders? How could Panafrica(s) be manifested? How would Pan-Africanism change society for African or Afro-Diasporic peoples?

While some foundational tenets shine through—self-determination, community building, reordering history to center Black voices—I spent most of my time trying to figure out how the curators connected the artworks (each excellent as stand-alone pieces, by the way) to the particular gallery’s theme. African American Alma Thomas and Egyptian Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar both painted outer-space imagery, but hardly with “Garveyist formations as a grounding,” as the theme label indicated. Similarly, two jackets and a mixed-media sailboat by Afro-Brazilian Arthur Bispo do Rosário were installed as the centerpiece of the Garveyism gallery, the only rationale being that Garvey had transformed ships from symbols of displacement to vessels for reconnection through his commercial Black Star Line enterprise.

The dissonance between the show’s narrow interpretation of Pan-African theories and its wideselection of works on viewbecame clearest in the Négritude gallery. Négritude, as formulated by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and others, revalorized the historic contributions of Black creatives toward the development of a universal civilization. But the movement was rather exclusive, referring to “Africa” as only Black peoples in sub-Saharan Africa and their diasporic descendants. When Senghor hosted the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal in 1966, he largely excluded Arab-Berber representation, reinforcing an image of a Black Africa rather than Africa as a geographic space with multiracial peoples.

Only three years later, the Organization of African Unity would host the Pan-African Festival of Algiers, countering Négritude’s focus on Blackness as a rallying point for solidarity in favor of a broader African identity that coalesced around resistance to Western imperialism, advocating for not only stronger connections between all African nations, but also between Africa and other spaces of resistance. Further demonstrating the complexity of the term “Pan-Africanism,” Nigeria changed the title of their 1977 festival to the Second World Black and AfricanFestival of Arts and Culture, acknowledging the increasingly fraught tensions for these identity markers.

So where were the didactics outlining these competing visions of Panafrica? In the Négritude gallery, it dawned on me that the rhetoric of “PaBP” as a whole was following a similar faulty logic where “Pan-African” meant “Black.” There was no explicit acknowledgment of North African artists who wouldn’t have identified as Pan-Africanist or Black—even though “PaBP” featured stellar pieces by such artists, including Gazbia Sirry, Ahmed Cherkaoui, and Inji Efflatoun.

Still, many of the selected Négritude artists were strong, with Ben Enwonwu, Palmer Hayden, Richmond Barthé, Wifredo Lam, and Papa Ibra Tall sensitively reclaiming the trans-Atlantic exchanges between traditional African sculpture and European Modernism. But on this matter too, wall texts flatten narratives, with Colette Omogbai’s deconstructed figure Agony (1963) mischaracterized as yet another “masked body” despite the artist stating that she makes no reference to forms from traditional masquerade, thus unfortunately rehashing reductive tropes grounding all African Modernists in indigenous tradition.

The three Pan-African philosophy galleries were so generalized that they left little foundation for the five subsequent themed rooms. Of course, there are resonances across time and space for artists of African heritage, but nearly every gallery followed a fatiguing formula: contemporary North African sculpture, Sub-Saharan Modernist painting, African American video, Afro-Brazilian assemblage … as if implying that most any Black artist of any generation could be plugged in interchangeably.

And while I can appreciate that many artists could indeed have been selected to speak to each theme, I was repeatedly perplexed by certain choices.Why were a painting of a Black albino by white South African Marlene Dumas and a minimalist sculpture by Pakistani Rasheed Araeen two of the handful of works selected to define the “Blackness” gallery? How was South African expatriate Valerie Desmore’s oversize painting of a crab an appropriate neighbor for Iba N’Diaye’s impassioned paintings of cries in the “Revenants” room, where works were meant to represent “healing with communal faith”? With nothing beyond the painting’s title beside the piece for a relatively unknown artist, it’s just one of many instances where the viewer is left adrift.

In the center of the show, the Circulation-themed gallery featured a horseshoe-shaped vitrine with a chronological display of 100 pieces of ephemera from Pan-African history. Highlighting the first issues of Jet and DRUM, the flights of the first African airlines, photographs from different liberation/independence movements, and many other publications, postcards, and paraphernalia, this display effectively related how different Pan-African actors intersected across the decades. Still, the general viewer is likely to walk away from the show with the impression that “African” artists are all on the same page, no matter where or when they lived. It’s not as if the show should highlight the divides between Black and African peoples; it’s that it ought to honor the diversity of the continent’s strategies, challenges, and beliefs. The “Pan” does not mean that “Africa” is a monolith—it indicates that all iterations of what it means to be African should be included. The potential remains for an insightful show that addresses Pan-African philosophies in their complex tensions, and perhaps “PaBP” is the springboard needed to inspire more nuanced reflections.