Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica Opens at Barbican, Redefining Global Art History

Landmark exhibition traces Pan-Africanism’s century-long impact on visual culture across five continents

Photo Courtesy: African art exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

When David Hammons raised his African-American Flag in 1990 — a defiant recoloring of the Stars and Stripes in red, black, and green — he wasn’t merely making a political statement. He was mapping a conceptual territory that the Barbican Art Gallery now claims as its own. Opening next week, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica represents the most ambitious institutional attempt yet to trace how Pan-Africanism transformed not just politics, but the very grammar of visual art across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Co-organized with the Art Institute of Chicago, MACBA Barcelona, and KANAL-Centre Pompidou Bruxelles, this is no ordinary summer blockbuster. With over 300 works spanning more than a century and drawn from Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, North America, and Western Europe, the exhibition fundamentally reorients our understanding of modern and contemporary art. Africa here is not a fixed geography but what the curators describe as “a conceptual terrain where rupture, dissent, and collective imagination converge.”

The exhibition’s intellectual architecture is deliberately disruptive. Rather than organizing works by nation or medium, the curators — led by the Barbican’s team in collaboration with international partners — have structured the show around thematic constellations: Diasporic Vision, Ritual and Resistance, Sonic Geographies, and The Unfinished Revolution. This approach allows unexpected dialogues to emerge. Wifredo Lam’s surrealist-inflected paintings of Afro-Cuban mythology from 1940s Havana speak directly to Chris Ofili’s elephant dung-adorned canvases from 1990s London. Marlene Dumas’s psychologically charged portraits enter conversation with Kerry James Marshall’s monumental reclamations of Black figure painting.

The inclusion of Magdalene Odundo — whose hand-built ceramic vessels distill centuries of African and global ceramic traditions into radically contemporary forms — alongside Ingrid Pollard’s photographic interrogations of British landscape and belonging demonstrates the exhibition’s refusal of medium-specific or generational hierarchies.

Several pieces function as gravitational centers within the sprawling exhibition. Hammons’ African-American Flag (1990) — that stark, almost brutal substitution of the American palette with Pan-African colors — hangs near the entrance, its presence still electric three decades later. The work’s power lies in its economy: by altering a single symbol, Hammons destabilized an entire mythology of national identity.

Simone Leigh’s Dunham (2017), a ceramic-and-bronze tribute to the pioneering dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, anchors a section exploring how Black women’s bodies have served as both an archive and a site of resistance. Leigh’s sculpture — simultaneously architectural and corporeal, ancient and urgently contemporary — embodies the exhibition’s temporal fluidity. Dunham, who brought Caribbean and African dance forms into American modernism while conducting pioneering anthropological research in Haiti, represents the kind of cross-cultural intellectual labor that Pan-Africanism enabled but which traditional art history has often marginalized.

What distinguishes this exhibition from conventional museum presentations is its programmatic ambition. The Barbican has scheduled over 30 events across film, music, performance, and talks, transforming the gallery into a dynamic cultural space rather than a repository of objects. This reflects the curators’ understanding that Pan-Africanism was never merely an aesthetic movement but a lived political and cultural practice.

The film program includes rare screenings of Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972) and Med Hondo’s Soleil O (1970), foundational works of Pan-African cinema that remain scandalously underseen in British institutions. Musical programming ranges from Afro-Brazilian traditions to contemporary London jazz, while performance events feature artists working at the intersection of ritual and contemporary practice.

The co-organizing institutions signal the exhibition’s intended global reach and its bid for art-historical permanence. The Art Institute of Chicago brings its formidable holdings of African American art; MACBA contributes expertise in Latin American and Caribbean modernisms; KANAL-Centre Pompidou Bruxelles offers a European perspective on colonial and postcolonial visual culture. This is exhibition-making as international coalition-building, mirroring the transnational solidarity that Pan-Africanism itself advocated.

For the Barbican, the show arrives at a critical moment. London’s cultural institutions have faced sustained scrutiny regarding their engagement with colonial history and contemporary diversity. Project a Black Planet does not merely check diversity boxes; it makes a substantive argument about the centrality of Pan-African artistic production to modernism itself. It asks not “where does Black art fit?” but “how do we understand modern art without Pan-Africanism?”

Early previews suggest the exhibition will generate significant critical debate. The sheer scope — 300 works, five continents, a century of production — risks flattening important distinctions between, say, Négritude’s Francophone literary origins and the Black Power movement’s distinctly American visual strategies. Yet the curators seem aware of this danger, using the thematic structure to emphasize friction and contradiction rather than false unity.

The inclusion of younger and less established artists alongside canonical figures like Marshall and Ofili suggests an attempt to avoid mere retrospective monumentalization. The real test will be whether the exhibition can make good on its promise to present Panafrica as a living conceptual terrain rather than a historical movement.

Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica opens at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, on 11 June 2026 and runs through 6 September 2026. Tickets are available through the Barbican website, with concession pricing for students and community groups. The accompanying events program runs throughout the exhibition period; booking is strongly recommended for film screenings and performances.

Given the exhibition’s scale and the likely demand, visitors should plan for multiple visits. This is not a show to be consumed in a single afternoon but one that rewards sustained engagement — a fitting approach to an artistic tradition that has always understood itself as a long revolution rather than a momentary rupture.

The exhibition travels to the Art Institute of Chicago in late 2026, with dates at MACBA Barcelona and KANAL-Centre Pompidou Bruxelles to be announced.