Every year during Black History Month, there’s an increased focus on acknowledging the importance of Black history, celebrating Black people and imagining Black futures. And it’s not just through the work of historians and researchers, who are now working to place Black history in its rightful place within academia. Visual artists are also using their work to relay truths in ways that textbooks can’t, providing room for nuance and complexity. Read on for six exhibitions around the globe to check out.
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, Chicago, United States.
Zanele Muholi. Somnyama III, Paris, from the series Somnyama Ngonyama, 2014. The Art Institute of Chicago, promised gift of Isabel Wilcox. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago.
From the moment artists like Picasso started referencing African sculpture in their own work, they tapped into an aesthetic that much of Western culture would go on to co-opt and use to reinforce primitivist distortions of African art, often reducing it to clichés of exaggerated facial features and geometric abstraction. Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africa offers a powerful counter-narrative, further deconstructing these familiar tropes.
As the first major exhibition to survey Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations, the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibit brings together over 350 objects, spanning from the 1920s to the present, made by artists from Africa, the Americas and Europe. The show reimagines Pan-Africa not as a fixed territory, but as a dynamic, shifting constellation—one that reassembles our understanding of the planet through the lens of decolonization, solidarity and the pursuit of an emancipatory future.
Art Institute of Chicago: December 15, 2024–March 30, 2025
Exhibition: Conversations, Liverpool, United Kingdom
On display at Walker Art Gallery. Photo: Pete Carr
For many Black female artists, there is a common thread in the the way they have led, whether guiding movements or reimagining possibilities through protest. Straddling the worlds of paint, sculpture and multimedia, Conversations is the U.K.’s first national gallery exhibition dedicated to Black women and non-binary artists.
Featuring nearly 40 visionaries, including Claudette Johnson, Lubaina Himid and Alberta Whittle, the exhibition is a tribute to the radical breadth of their practice. Shaped through direct contributions from the artists themselves, Conversations aspires to be both a reckoning and a celebration, challenging the historical sidelining of Black British women in public collections and art history at large.
Walker Art Gallery: October 19, 2024—March 9, 2025
The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, Philadelphia, United States
Named after James Baldwin’s powerful call to action and rooted in his lifelong engagement with race and social justice in America, The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure exhibition brings together 28 contemporary Black and African diasporic artists to reflect on the shifting forces shaping our world today.
Helmed by British curator Ekow Eshun, the exhibition intends to push back against historical depictions of Black figures in Western art through the celebration of Black joy and resilience. Each piece will invite viewers to confront their perceptions and engage with the richness of Black life in layers.
North Carolina Museum of Art: March 8—June 29, 2025
Noah Davis, London, United Kingdom
Known for what he described as “the desire to represent the people” around him, artist Noah Davis was a singular imaginative force. He will receive some well-deserved attention in the form of the U.K.’s first institutional survey of his work.
During his career, Davis crafted a striking and deeply human body of work, blending influences from found imagery, personal memories, cinema, and art history. His paintings captured the subtleties of daily life with an emotional depth that resonated beyond the canvas.
In 2012, he co-founded The Underground Museum with the vision of making high-calibre art freely accessible to the Arlington Heights community in Los Angeles. This exhibition showcases more than 50 pieces spanning his practice in painting, sculpture, curatorial projects and community engagement, highlighting his impact from 2007 until his passing in 2015.
Barbican Centre: February 6—May 11, 2025
Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way, Toronto, Ontario
The Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way exhibition doesn’t just embody the three-dimensional challenges Black women in the music industry face—it amplifies them, adopting the rhythms and textures of video, collage, music, and sculpture to honour the improvisational prowess of four Black female musicians: Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha, Sofia Jernberg, and Tanita Tikaram.
A pioneering British artist and educator, Boyce has spent decades exploring the politics of identity, community and collaboration, often centring Black British experiences in her multidisciplinary practice.
First unveiled at the 2022 Venice Biennale—where it earned the prestigious Golden Lion—Feeling Her Way has since travelled to North America, debuting last summer at Montreal’s PHI Foundation. Now, thanks to the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, the exhibition arrives in Toronto, continuing its journey of amplifying Black women’s voices across borders.
Art Gallery of Ontario: September 19, 2024—April 6, 2025
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Paris Noir, Paris, France
Billed as a “vibrant immersion in a cosmopolitan Paris,” this showcase promises to spotlight 150 artists of African descent between the late 1940s and 2000s—none of whom have ever officially exhibited their work in the region.
Rather than a self-portrait of purely homegrown art, the exhibit seeks to flip the imagery, invoking an era when Black artists and intellectuals — writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Jessie Fauset; visual artists such as Romare Bearden and Augusta Savage; performers Nina Simone and Paul Robeson; and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois — journeyed to Paris in search of political solidarity, creative freedom and a refuge for both their work and their well-being.
The show will highlight historical works that pose questions of freedom, identity, and equality, blending them with pieces from a diverse group of Black artists spanning a range of styles, from Afro-Surrealism to pure abstraction.