100 Years of How Black Painters See Themselves

New York Times

10-02-2025

At the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, the Cameroonian-born curator Koyo Kouoh — who will oversee the main exhibition at the 2026 Venice Biennale — has filled the vast Art Nouveau galleries with works by artists from Africa and the African diaspora. More than 150 paintings by around 120 artists, most seen in Brussels for the first time, show people and scenes of Black life across the globe.
Kouoh's show, 'When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,' which runs through Aug. 10, originated at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa museum in Cape Town, which Kouoh has helmed since 2019. The show demonstrates the sophisticated breadth of her curatorial approach, which is both aesthetic and art historical, painterly and political.
In the exhibition catalog, Kouoh notes that there has been an explosion of exhibitions exploring Black culture since the 2020 police murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, with a particular interest in how Black artists represent themselves both as individuals and as members of communities.
Her contribution, 'When We See Us,' adapts its title from Ava DuVernay's 2019 Netflix mini-series about the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongfully accused of rape and assault. But where DuVernay's story of violence and brutality had 'They' — 'When They See Us' — Kouoh has 'We,' pointing to the importance of Black self-expression, or the ability to tell one's own story. The art on show here does not only exist in relation to oppression or otherness, but also on its own expansive, frequently gorgeous, terms.
The display at Bozar groups paintings according to six loose themes — 'The Everyday,' 'Repose,' 'Triumph and Emancipation,' 'Sensuality,' 'Spirituality' and 'Joy and Revelry' — mixing old and new. (The birth years of the artists range from 1886 to 1999.) Although each painter can be associated with a particular nation, artistic movement or era, Kouoh's aim is to tease out the hidden connections. We begin to see a wider web that connects these artists across time and space, regardless of borders and boundaries.
In the first section, 'The Everyday,' you might notice different attitudes toward realism: from the West Chester, Pa.-born painter Horace Pippin's 'Victory Garden' (1943), striking for its brightly blooming flowers, to the South African George Pemba's portrait of a nurse at work, 'At the Clinic' (1979), to the Botswanan Meleko Mokgosi's immense triptych of enigmatic domestic scenes, 'Pax Kaffraria: Graase-Mans' (2014).
But not every painting is straightforward in style. In the 'Repose' section, figures are more at ease, sitters are engaged in conversation, lost in thought or looking away from the viewer. The styles here vary, with figures sometimes painted loosely, abstracted, or collaged, as if to say that, in repose, we are permitted some leave of our bodily selves.
I loved the pairing in this section of two radically different paintings that upended the traditional Western 'odalisque,' or eroticized reclining nude: the Kenyan painter Wangari Mathenge's 'Sundials and Sonnets' (2019), a large, realist portrait of a woman in a blue bathing suit who fixes us in her gaze as she reclines languidly on a bright yellow sofa, was hung next to the American artist Henry Taylor's 'Ly for Me' (2010), a small, impressionistic image of a woman lying on an ornate couch in a cluttered living room. In both, the women are clothed, self-possessed and commanding of our gaze. They look as if they might get up and walk away at any moment.
There is a huge amount of work to take in and — given the focus on figurative art — there is also a lot of visual overlap. But pictures of people are also filled with stylistic choices, and these are as diverse as their makers.
Textures, textiles, postures and patterns repeat throughout, like calls from room to room: for instance, the glittering black rhinestone hair of the entangled paramours in Mickalene Thomas's humorously titled 'Never Change Lovers in the Middle of the Night' (2006), and the shimmering sequins and glitter that cover the locks of the central figure in Devan Shimoyama's 'The Abduction of Ganymede' (2019).
There are no pristine white spaces or rigid demarcations from room to room or theme to theme. Instead, paintings hang on green, red, ocher and orange walls. Free-standing displays bifurcate some spaces, but their structures are gently curved with ramps and sloping corners. A soundscape, made in response to the show by the South African composer and sound artist Neo Muyanga, plays throughout. If we need new ways of thinking about Black figurative art and how it fits into the canon, Kouoh's presentation seems to argue that we also need new kinds of spaces within the museum itself.
At the close of the show hangs 'The Birthday Party' (2021) by Esiri Erheriene-Essi, which shows the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who was murdered by the police at age 30. In this picture, painted in warm hues, he is very much alive: thriving, holding out a birthday cake, surrounded by friends, wearing a Malcolm X pin on his shirt and the badge from a London soccer team on his hat. It is a scene of sheer joy.
Next year, when Kouoh becomes the first African woman to oversee the Venice Biennale, I look forward to seeing more of the ambitious ethos that underpins the Brussels show: the refusal of neat lineages in favor of new ways of seeing the past, present and future.