Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora embodies the diverse cultural influences acting on twelve artists from Africa now living in Western countries whose works challenge, provoke, question, and often play with, issues of identity construction, national and cultural affiliations, globalism, displacement, and artistic freedom.

The twelve artists featured throughout the exhibition use mediums from video, sculpture, installation art, photography, painting, works on paper, and even their own bodies to examine subjects ranging from the portrayal of psychological landscapes and the defining of one’s place through material culture, to the assimilation into or exclusion from Western culture. Looking Both Ways sets the standard for the paradigm shift in presentations and discussions of the works of contemporary artists of African descent.

Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora toured to the following venues: Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (2004); Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (2004); Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal (2004-05); City Art Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland (2005); and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, California (2006).