The Art Institute of Chicago has thrown its members and the city itself a very interesting challenge in its exhibition “Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africa.” African artists and scholars have continually been deeply dismayed by much of the western mind’s inability to define Africa beyond the framework of slavery, colonialism, and victimization. Nefertiti to Cleopatra to Uncle Tom’s Cabin with Lil Nell out on the ice seems to be the extent, the whole of Africa, to many people. They hold this view despite there being a long world history of repeated accounts of trade, diplomatic, cultural, and intellectual exchange with the rest of the known world.

        The launchings of the impressive fleets of China’s Admiral Zheng He (c.1371-1433) on his visits to East Africa, and the Ming Dynasty Emperor Yongle’s diplomatic court exchange visit with the Somali Emperor, plus tapestries and drawings of giraffes and other exotic animals sent as gifts of exchange between kings and emperors across the world are part of any evidence of African history. The Menil Foundation’s ten volume coffee table-size format survey, “The Image of The Black in Western Art” is hard to imagine being overlooked by anyone not blind, yet few libraries can name it as one of their hot lists.

        There is the economic story of how colonialism and its operant capitalism victimized and dispersed certain vital African systems, but it seems that the more prescient, productive, and effective story is of what these dispersed systems carried away, the story of how they reconstituted, across uncharted time and territory, these systems into sustainable, productive, and competitively successful ways and worlds of life.

        The Art Institute of Chicago exhibition projects the images of our shared world life for the past one hundred fifty years as a shared Black Planet. On a planet whose locations are designated not from anything there, not from anyone there, but drawn up arbitrarily from some special interest (usually economic) of someone from someplace else, the question is where is anyone or anywhere? The answer is in what people are doing where they happen to be.

        The inhabitants of planet earth are all migrant, dispersed. The latest dispersal from Africa by colonialist economies however has powerfully, through its shared qualities of system, been able to swiftly reconstitute itself, and re-disperse or resituate itself throughout the world’s cultures as a unified system within itself—un-bordered, un-located, even un-cultured.

        The Pan-Africanism exhibition challenges people unable to even envision Africa, with the prospect of an even larger Africa projected. Even further, in its curatorial method, the exhibition challenges the viewer with the ubiquitousness of its evidence.

        From pots and pans to finely turned ceramic; driftwood come alive as a conjure woman, a tree vine with a woman shaped inside; scraps of wood hung as ancestors, as if an inheritance genealogy carved into a granary door; abandoned junk door panels as abandoned openings, failed entries lined up or barricaded, giving witness from megaphone wired speakers; these are the matter of this exhibit. This is all immediately recognizable as what the stuff of our daily lives reconstitutes to say to us of what is going on. The who-what-and-where carries on in a mode that is decidedly Pan-African modelled.

        The exhibition points out that what Picasso and others took up as “primitivism” into geometry and cubism, then into something else in their ongoing study, was and is the ongoing study of African systems carrying the dispersal of their symbol languages. Paris was a local instance of the Pan-African century. Lois Maillou Jones, in her Veve Voudou II,1963 was still breaking down the lines of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as were many of the popular covers of print, for example: Elisa Larkin Nascimento’s Pan-Africanism and South America: Emergence of A Black Rebellion, 1981; Mohhammed Khadda, 1^st festival culteral panafricain 1969; Ibou (Ibrahima)Diouf, poster, Des Arts Negres, 1-24 Avril 1966, Dakar, Senegal, 1966.

        This problem of how to carry on and continue with what we have, with what has escaped, of course, has its political and theoretical levels evinced in the textual argument of these art works. The argument developing within the symbolism and graphology also has its own story. One line to follow between three examples of these works is one of the more interesting social arguments surrounding image and use.

        Take these works: John Strollmeyer, Caribbean Basin, 1982; Batoul S’Himi, Untitled, from the series World Under Pressure, 2011; David Hammons, African American Flag, 1990, and Chris Ofili, Union Black, 2003. One of the significant qualities of African art is the mysteriousness of the ordinary object, the embodiment of the spiritual possession in the owned object. In John Strollmeyer’s, Caribbean Basin, the common material, a washbasin, is, as commonly, rusted at the bottom: but the rusted out areas draw the specific map of Cuba and other Caribbean Islands. Untitled, from the series World Under Pressure, is Batoul S’Himi’s pressure cooker, an advanced system of cooking that relies on containment and force to cook. The vessel has a hole in it—not softly rusted but sharply cut out is a map of the world with its raw etched borders as if blown out—an image of containment and its release. David Hammon’s African American Flag and Chris Ofili’s Union Black are examples of the spiritual force of color taking over the power of a flag and resettling the meaning elsewhere. The spirit of one meaning of a thing taking over the force of that object with a different meaning here is different than simple metaphor or metamorphosis. Here it seems to have hold of a particular agency to it—more soul than formality, more spirit.

        The embodiment or spiritualization of pattern and symbol carries over into the language of fashion. The human face as a mask of patterns and symbols rather than simple portraiture is another significant quality of African art. From the ubiquitous photography of Parisian fashion art comes Zanele Muholi’s Somnyanna III, Paris, an image calling up the luxe of exotic animal fur collars currently available to the elite, but also calling up the Benin Bronzes of the Queen Mothers from the African nineteenth century. Yet, then again, the fashion industry’s commodification of Black beauty, while supporting racism, nooses the necks in the background. Kiluanji Kia Henda, in his The Merchant of Venice from the series Self Portrait as a White Man calls up his spirit from deeper in history, from images of earlier Renaissance trade wealth and African participation in that accumulation—and Othello’s victimization. This line of imagery in the exhibition leads the viewer to Samuel Fosso’s The Chief Who Sold Africa to the Colonialists from the series Tati, one of the most arresting images in the show, and, also, the cover image of the exhibition publicity. What struck me first with this picture was the startling symmetrical composition with its pinpoint centering, even to the X crossed alignment of the person and his accoutrements nailed at the center of the image. For all its surreality, it still is as believable as any of today’s fashion statements, as likely as any selfie taken and sent minutes ago. Perhaps that is what is most disturbing.

        Many institutions, such as Brown University, have self-acknowledged their existence on the legacy wealth of human trafficking, while many of such powers here and in Africa are still in possession of that legacy, and patrons of such exotic fashion have acknowledged nothing. The Chief Who Sold Africa with its bizarrely drawn wall of handled mirrors is too disturbingly close to the throne rooms of our today.

        If we were asked to designate which of the images in the exhibition is meant to depict posing on the red carpet of an award ceremony, hustling at a high-end trade show, or taking a selfie at the private after-party, we would be hard put to choose, and we would shudder at the task.

        What the exhibition has done is to show how one dispersal has shifted another from its steadfastness. Though that is in part the show’s aim. “Project A Black Planet” specifically aims to show differing work and example artifacts of dispersed Black People imagining a Black World through their art’s comment on things of the day.

        So, does it succeed? How could it? One complicating problem is the complex alignments within Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and Quilombismo. A second problem is the broad range of forms, materials, and objectives in the works of art. Some obvious solutions, such as David Hammon and Chris Ofili with their flags’ revolution in color, bridge the difference. But other questions of body, of human possession of material, and questions of continuity, history, and spirit, lead out into further takes on this shared exile. What world is that? This question has clearly (and I think rightly) gone unanswered but for us to project.

        It was well worth examining the 372 pieces in the exhibition. Despite the difficulties and complications with the exhibition just enumerated, I found the show extremely informative and thought provoking—and necessary.

Ed Roberson is Emeritus Professor, Northwestern University. He is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Ask What Has Changed, 2021 (Wesleyan University Press), and MPH and Other Road Poems, 2021 (Verge Publications). He is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.