Toward a Borderless Imagination

The term itself—with “pan” meaning “all” or “universal”—evokes a land without boundaries. Its original ideas were first circulated around 1900 by political thinkers and cultural activists seeking freedom, equality, and unity for Black people in colonized Africa and across the diaspora. Today advocates of Pan-Africanism continue to promote global solidarity for Black peoples and work to center Africa in international affairs and modern history. But the term “Panafrica” has come to mean something more—it is both a conceptual promised land that transforms and reassembles standard representations of the planet and a humanity that might see itself as interlocked, or even united.

Tectonic Plate (2010), by French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, embodies these ideas, inviting us to look at the map of the world with a view to rearranging it. Her wall relief recalls a kindergarten game for teaching tectonic drift, a geological phenomenon whereby the world’s continents are slowly but constantly shifting relative to one another. Sliding the puzzle pieces, children might grasp the scale of this geographical movement, just as they might see how it could be that there was once a supercontinent. Barrada encourages the vision of a united people by placing Africa at the center of her world map and coloring the continents in various tints of epidermal brown.

Barrada’s work is just one of some 350 objects from across the globe—and encompassing nearly every creative form—on view now in Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a wide-ranging exploration that seeks to illuminate Pan-Africanist insights and show their great influence on art and culture over the past century and more.

A number of these works, like Barrada’s, involve radical mapping, and several others undo the conventional symbolism of national flags, speaking similarly to the dissolution of borders. A key reference point for these works is the Pan-African flag, a banner introduced in Harlem around 1920 through the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Also called the UNIA flag or the Garveyist flag (after the UNIA founders Marcus Garvey and Amy Ashwood Garvey), the Pan-African flag is a stark tricolor composition of red, black, and green stripes, without any of the usual symbols, such as stars or scepters. The flag has inspired many creative works, and today it remains among the most popular symbols of Pan-Africanism.

Unlike conventional flags, the UNIA flag does not designate a fixed country. Instead it symbolically joins Black people and freedom movements worldwide, attesting to the power of a borderless imagination. The flag’s colors add rich meaning: red for the blood shared by all who have African ancestry, no matter where they live; black for people of African descent who assert their right to sovereignty; and green for the verdant land of Africa.

In 1989 the artist David Hammons hybridized the Pan-African and American flags to conjure a transnational unity in which borders are not only crossed but productively reimagined. Fifteen years later, British artist Chris Ofili made Union Black, knowingly bringing Hammons’s idea across the Atlantic. Project a Black Planet includes both works along with others that make creative use of the red, black, and green.

The exhibition also includes a series by Kenyan artist Kawira Mwirichia of flag-like kangas, textiles commonly used throughout East Africa, that speak to crossing borders of a different kind. Queerness oversteps boundaries at many levels and shows ways to accept one another as we wish to be in the world. In 2017, to increase awareness of queer history and give it a global dimension, Mwirichia worked with others in the Nairobi queer community to design a set of kanga cloths, which she thought of as flags or banners, that pay homage to queer activism in all the world’s internationally recognized countries. The kangas that make up To Revolutionary Type Love (TRTL), or Kanga Pride, display at their center either a symbol or a portrait of one or two queer rights activists in the named country. Thus, queerness in TRTL is shown through individuals, but it carries a planetary reach.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the map of the world was actually being redrawn, albeit in fits and starts. Independence movements across Africa and the Caribbean began increasingly to succeed, and people of color in South America, the United States, and Europe made advances for claims to civil rights. It is not surprising that, during these decades, the image of the African continent also became a popular symbol.

The image recurs on several of the more than 100 magazine and book covers, record albums, and other ephemera of international popular culture showcased at the center of Project a Black Planet. These items, which were made to be handled and passed around, also connect the planetary scale of Pan-Africanist ambition with the no-less-important human scale of individual adherents.

On a 1976 cover for Ebony, the lavish illustrated magazine published in Chicago, Africa is pictured as a continent literally composed of future-oriented individuals. Meanwhile, women readers especially could identify with a 1963 cover for Bingo—another “glossy” with a readership that spanned French-speaking countries in West and Central Africa—featuring the “first ladies of Africa,” whose heads appear to blossom on stalks across the map of Africa. And from Brazil to the optimistically named United States of Africa, the political journal Pan-Africa used the upright figure of a Pan-African Lady Liberty to suture now-distant landmasses and project the Black world as a unity whose contours will be established by Black people rather than their oppressors.

Similarly, Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra), a cubist sculpture created by Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall in 2003, depicts the African continent as both a place and a worldview. Constructed from plywood painted a viscous black, with gaps and pieces out of place, Marshall’s Africa is marked by the process of healing historically produced tears and wounds.

Marshall has also dressed the continent, garlanding its fractured surface with a dense layer of medallions, buttons, and icons—some affixed directly and others strung with gold chains—with laminated photographs presenting a wide array of African and African diasporic cultural and political figures. These include Marshall’s wife, the actress and director Cheryl Lynn Bruce, costumed as Cleopatra; a portrait of Nefertiti, asserting her Blackness; and a maternal reference to Lucy, one of the earliest hominid skeletons, which was found in Ethiopia. Decorated and embellished, at once intimate and world historical, Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra) stretches from the deep past to the present and stands at the center of the planet, pulling fragmented and dispersed elements together in a new configuration.

For the space of this show, we hope you’ll join in projecting the utopian possibility of a unified, interdependent world.

—Antawan I. Byrd, associate curator, Photography and Media, the Art Institute of Chicago, and assistant professor, Art History, Northwestern University; Adom Getachew, professor, Political Science and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, the University of Chicago; and Matthew S. Witkovsky, vice president for strategic art initiatives and Sandor Chair of Photography and Media, the Art Institute of Chicago

Sponsors

Major support for Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica is provided by The Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Family Foundation, Hilary and Gidon Cohen, Anita Blanchard and Martin Nesbitt, the Artworkers Retirement Society, the Council for Canadian American Relations, The Opatrny Family Foundation, the Lewis and Susan Manilow Fund, and Gary Metzner and Scott Johnson.

Seed funding has been provided by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation (EHTF). Research partnership and funding is provided by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. Additional research funding has been contributed by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

Corporate Sponsor

Additional support is provided by

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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