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Antique Senufo Gong
Antique one-of-a-kind iron gong.
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EXHIBITIONS

The Museum for African Art is dedicated to increasing public understanding and appreciation of African art and culture. The Museum is recognized worldwide as the pre-eminent organizer of exhibitions and publisher of books devoted exclusively to African art.

New York City galleries are closed until the completion of the Museum's new construction on Fifth Avenue and 110th Street in Manhattan. For more information about our new home, click here.

Current Traveling Exhibitions

A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art

A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art

This exhibition is available for travel.

Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art
features Congolese urban art that portrays the life and tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Congo after its independence from Belgium in 1960. The exhibition consists of approximately 90 works, including a series of nearly 50 paintings by Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu, an influential artist of the 1970s, and a number of recent works by other Congolese contemporary artists who emulate his style. These paintings demonstrate how memories of Lumumba were transformed into a powerful visual narrative of a popular cultural hero.

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Desert Jewels: North African Jewelry and Photography from the Xavier Guerrand-Hermes Collection

Desert Jewels: North African Jewelry and Photography from the Xavier Guerrand-Hermes Collection

This exhibition is available for travel.

Collected over three decades by Xavier Guerrand-Hermes, this unique collection reveals the astonishing power of traditional North African jewelry.Crafted from silver and semiprecious stones, the jewels, from simple ornaments that would be worn by a child to elaborate necklaces for women of wealth, illustrate the cultural diversity as well as the common themes that run through North African societies. The accompanying photographs depict the daily life of North African people as well as the breathtaking landscape and archaeological monuments that caught the attention of Westerners in the late 19th and early 20th century.

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Dogon Now: Masks in Motion

Dogon Now: Masks in Motion

This exhibition is available for travel.

The Dogon people of Mali have created an extraordinary cultural heritage, deeply embedded in a beautiful yet fragile physical environment. Masks in Motion: Dogon Now brings to life the performative experience of Dogon masquerade as a living and dynamic tradition that continues to evolve at the turn of the 21st century. This multimedia exhibition integrates masks and related objects with videos of ceremonies and performances, as well as interviews and photographs. As will be seen throughout the galleries, the Dogon create representations of their society that draw upon the past to meet the challenges of the present.

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Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria

Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria

Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria is a landmark exhibition devoted to the art of Ife, the ancient city-state of the Yoruba people of West Africa (in present-day southwestern Nigeria). The exhibition highlights the artistic accomplishments of this unique 12th- to 15th-century civilization and examines how factors of dynastic power and divine authority shaped their exceptional arts. Featuring more than 100 extraordinary bronze, terra-cotta, and stone sculptures ranging in date from the 9th to the 15th centuries, Dynasty and Divinity presents many works that have never before been on display outside of Nigeria.

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El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa

El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa

El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa brings together the full range of El Anatsui's work, from wood trays made in Ghana referencing traditional Akan symbols, early ceramics from the Broken Pots series, through chainsaw-carved wood, to his most recent luminous metal sculptures and wall hangings. Anatsui has gained international acclaim for his dazzling metallic hangings made from liquor bottle caps. In these sculptures, as in wood and ceramics, Anatsui pieces together monumental visual statements that refer to global, local, and personal histories.

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Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art

This exhibition is available for travel.

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art
presents the remarkable beauty of coiled basketry and demonstrates how the utilitarian rice fanner and market basket can be viewed simultaneously as objects of use, containers of memory, and works of art. The exhibition features 225 objects including baskets from the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia and from diverse regions of Africa, as well as African sculpture from the rice-growing societies which, through the agency of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, exported their cultures to America.

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Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist

Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist

This exhibition is available for travel.

Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist is the first museum retrospective of the exemplary career of Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi. Bringing together approximately 80 works from five decades of the artist's career, the retrospective highlights one of the most significant figures in African and Arab Modernist art, and reveals his place in the context of a global art history. The exhibition traces a personal journey that originates in Sudan and leads to the artist's international schooling, his detention as a political prisoner in his home country, his self-imposed exile in Qatar, and his current life in the United Kingdom.

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Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope)

Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope)

Jane Alexander is one of the most significant South African artists working today. Her animal-human sculptures, photographs, and dramatic installations speak of lasting disfigurations in her native South Africa, yet raise issues about human nature that resonate with viewers internationally. Alexander's hybrid-mutants inhabit a universe where boundaries between self and other, human and animal, are unstable, where shared foundations and clashing differences are disclosed, and where the grotesque and the familiar entwine. Alexander "has arguably created and developed one of the most compelling personal galaxies of the contemporary art universe." (Pep Subiros, On Being Human)

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The Beautiful Time: Photography by Sammy Baloji

The Beautiful Time: Photography by Sammy Baloji

This exhibition presents the work of Sammy Baloji, a Congolese photographer and video artist who explores colonial architecture and copper mines in the city of Lubumbashi, located in the southeastern Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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