Black (Art) History Month

In commemorating Black History Month, we celebrate the vibrant spectrum of artistic expression that redefines and reclaims the multifaceted nature of black identity. Contemporary practitioners, through diverse mediums—from painting and sculpture to performance, installation, and digital media—engage with a storied past and an evolving present, challenging historical omissions and forging new dialogues.

This curated editorial underscores the transformative capacity of art to both honor legacy and incite critical discourse, inviting viewers to witness a continuous rearticulation of identity informed by lived experience and collective memory.

These creative practices are deeply rooted in a myriad of geographical and historical contexts, reflecting the diasporic journeys and localized narratives that comprise the black experience. The artists featured here navigate the interstices of tradition and modernity with intellectual rigor and aesthetic innovation, blending academic inquiry with a commitment to social justice.

Their works, imbued with subtle allusions to the complex intersections of culture, history, and politics, offer a didactic exploration of blackness as both a personal and communal construct, ever-responsive to the demands of contemporary art and thought.

Okiki Akinfe’s practice centers on reconfiguring archival representations of black identity through a framework she describes as ‘The Black Lens.’ Born in London in 1999, she has swiftly emerged as a pivotal figure in contemporary painting following her academic formations at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art. Her work disrupts conventional stereotypes by inverting the dominant white gaze, instead establishing a nuanced space where ghostly, self-determined figures inhabit their own temporality.

Employing a refined synthesis of underpainting, meticulous drawing, and expressive brushwork on linen, Akinfe’s canvases evoke both the tactile immediacy of traditional media and the conceptual rigor of contemporary art. By interlacing influences from classical portraiture with modernist abstraction, her oeuvre offers a meditative inquiry into the intersections of personal memory and collective history, subtly articulating the diverse, diasporic narratives that continue to shape black existence.

Binta Diaw, a Senegalese-Italian visual artist based in Milan, has recently expanded her practice to foreground the photographic medium as a vital tool for interrogating the contours of Black identity. Integrating photography with installation and mixed-media practices, Diaw constructs visual narratives that capture the ephemeral interplay of light, texture, and memory.

Her photographic works—ranging from intimate portraiture to expansive, archival-style images—serve as both documentation and reinterpretation of cultural rites, particularly those linked to migration and the lived experience of Black womanhood.

By framing these images in unconventional, site-specific installations, Diaw challenges traditional modes of representation, inviting viewers to reconsider the role of photography as a medium that both preserves and transforms collective histories. In doing so, her work articulates a critical dialogue between the immediacy of the lens and the enduring weight of diasporic narratives.

At the border between memories and dreams, Rachel Marsil plunges us into an intimate and colorful universe in which interior scenes, moments of reunion, subtle latency of the pose before the click of the photo are entangles. A set of supple silhouettes inhabit the space of the canvases, they seem to be immersed in contemplative waiting.

Their gaze is turned towards us peacefully, their faces are hypnotic and their features, similar from one character to another remain unique. They seem to look beyond the visible into a world of the subconscious in which we take part.

Those who know the artist will perhaps recognise her face in the characters. The canvas is like a mirror in which to explore one’s identity. Originally, Rachel Marsil dives into her family photographs; each scene is an opportunity to revisit a memory, sometimes even to reinvent it. For the artist, painting is a narrative of a larger personal story where history with a capital H, intimate history and fantasized vision mix. Faced with the flaws of our memory, dreams and projections are powerful poetic tools. Everything in the paintings contributes to plunge us into a state in-between.

Born in 1990 to an Ivorian father and a Guadeloupean mother, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien grew up between Abidjan and Paris. She lives and works in Paris.

Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Cergy, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien has developed an ambitious, sensitive and polymorphous personal practice. Creator of new forms, explorer of materials and signs, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien defines herself as a storyteller of poems. Like labyrinths or rebus, her works compose new topographies around the themes of femininity, identity and the body, at the crossroads of her Caribbean and West African heritage.

The artist’s works, on the border of sculpture, weaving and installation, offer us the possibility of navigating the meanders of their poetic narratives, of losing the landmarks that have been bequeathed to us in order to perhaps better redraw a path of life that is our own.

Working largely in black and white format, Sabelo Mlangeni has built his practice around intimate photographs that draw out the inherent beauty in the ordinary.

Mlangeni is driven by his interest in the notions of community and communing where a central part of his process requires him to spend significant time —weeks, months, sometimes years—with those he chooses to photograph; sharing intimately in their thoughts, feelings, stories and everyday lives. His practice is a continuous survey of the most challenging, beautiful and confounding aspects of the human experience.

He states: “I have been moving around Johannesburg and its closest suburbs as someone interested in story-telling about everyday life. In my early walks, I found myself in many spaces where the situation and the living conditions were impossible to look at and to photograph. Then I started wondering, what to frame? Soon another side of the hardships emerged, and I attempted to capture that hidden beauty, that ordinary peace.”

Sandra Mujinga’s groundbreaking practice fuses performance, sound, and multimedia installations to interrogate and reframe narratives surrounding Black identity. With an acute sensitivity to the politics of visibility, her immersive environments challenge conventional representations by harnessing the interplay of sensory experience and conceptual inquiry.

Her work has been recognized on an international scale—with exhibitions at prestigious institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London—underscoring her role as a pivotal voice in contemporary discourse.

By orchestrating a dynamic synthesis of evocative soundscapes, performative gestures, and striking visual elements, Mujinga deconstructs entrenched cultural scripts and invites viewers into a transformative dialogue on resistance, memory, and the reclamation of narrative agency in today’s art landscape.

Samuel Nnorom reorients his creative inquiry around the tactile language of fabric, with a profound emphasis on the art of tissage. His practice meticulously engages with traditional weaving techniques, reimagining the interplay of thread and texture to articulate narratives of black heritage, memory, and transformation.

By harnessing the materiality of textiles, Nnorom creates intricate installations that serve as both historical archives and contemporary commentaries on the fluidity of identity. The careful layering of fabric—a nod to ancestral craft traditions—invites viewers to contemplate the convergence of cultural persistence and innovative artistic expression.

Koyade Ojo’s sculptural installations interrogate the world of fast fashion and counterfeit glamour by reconfiguring aspirational clothing and furniture into unsettling, artful tableaux. In his work, familiar objects are subverted—a cascade of wigs, reimagined as if pouring from inverted champagne bottles, and tailored trousers suspended upside down from music stands, their seams spilling glittering fragments of faux luxury onto reflective surfaces.

These precarious arrangements, rendered on high-gloss finishes, expose the inherent artifice of modern consumer culture, inviting viewers to confront the tension between genuine allure and manufactured spectacle. Ojo’s work, with its audacious attitude and incisive critique, dismantles the façade of contemporary style, challenging us to reconsider the seductive power of fast fashion and the ephemeral nature of what we deem glamorous.