04/29/2026
”Oftentimes, what isn’t questioned in the conversation on Pan-Africanism is what’s lost in this panoptic vision of Black experience. How do we maintain the specificity of the local within global solidarity struggles? How do you build a global resistance movement through such a nebulous construct, through a poetic conception that, at its best, instills a shared sense of history but, at its worst, fails to acknowledge the economical, ecological disparities with which we take up liberation struggles on a local scale?” - Re’al Christian
In “The Far-off Elsewhere: Exhibiting Pan-Africanism,” Art Papers contributing editor examines several recent and historical American exhibitions that center Pan-Africanism, and similar conceptions of a wider Black Diaspora, as their subject. Christian methodically assesses how each exhibition demonstrates the strengths and pitfalls of Pan-Africanism as an ethos in service of liberation.
Read the full feature at ARTPAPERS.org.
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, installation view, Dec 2024–Mar 2025, Reproduction of Haley Woodruff’s The Art of the Negro, 1950-1951, [courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago]
Jeff Wall, After Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, the Preface (2002). [photo: Ryszard Kasiewicz; courtesy of documenta, Kassell Germany © documenta Archive]
Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics,installation view, Dec 2024 – Aug 2025 [courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art]