Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora is a distinctive exhibition that embodies the diverse cultural influences acting on twelve artists from Africa now living in Western countries. 

Challenging, provoking, questioning, and often playing with, issues of identity construction, national and cultural affiliations, globalism, displacement, and artistic freedom, Looking Both Ways will sets the standard for the paradigm shift in presentations and discussions of the works of contemporary artists of African descent.

The twelve artists featured throughout the exhibition use everything from their own bodies to video, sculpture, installation art, photography, painting, to works on paper to examine subjects ranging from the portrayal of psychological landscapes, defining one’s place through material culture, to the assimilation into or exclusion from Western culture.

Organized by the Museum for African Art and presented November 14, 2003-March 1, 2004 at the Museum's temporary Long Island City Gallery, New York. 

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