Black figuration is not over. It is not redundant. It is not a phase. It is a living language—one that refuses silence and insists on presence, on imagination, on becoming.
In an age where the visual field is oversaturated, the ongoing prominence of figuration in Black and African art stands not as aesthetic repetition, but as an urgent political and cultural gesture—a reclaiming of presence, history, and imaginative sovereignty.
Portraiture has long occupied a central space in African and Black artistic traditions. Whether
through ancestral sculpture, mural painting, or photography, the impulse to depict the self and the community has never been incidental—it reflects the value we place on kinship, legacy, and relational identity. Figuration, then, is not merely about likeness, but about memory, ritual, and resistance. It is a language deeply rooted in cultural continuity and spiritual function.
In contemporary practice, Black figuration continues to evolve. It moves beyond visibility to agency; beyond representation to reinvention. At a moment when some voices in the art world claim that “Black portraiture is over,” we must ask: for whom? This declaration too often masks a desire to erase Black presence once again—rendering our bodies, our dreams, and our pain invisible under the guise of novelty fatigue. This exhibition responds to that impulse directly. It insists on our right to be seen, on our own terms, in all our emotional and conceptual complexity.
The artists in this show work across a spectrum of media—sculpture, painting, photography, collage, digital and mixed media—but are united in their pursuit of figuration as a living, adaptable tool. Here, Blackness is not pinned to realism alone. It stretches into abstraction, surrealism, fragmentation, and the speculative. It refuses confinement.
