AUGUST 15, 2026 THROUGH JANUARY 3, 2027
Masquerade has long stood as the iconic African performance genre, and yet the artists who create masquerades are often unacknowledged and under-represented in exhibitions and publications. New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations showcases the artworks and voices of individual creators and offers a fresh take on the vitality of masquerade arts. New African Masquerades makes clear that creativity in African masking is fundamentally contemporary, highly collaborative in nature, and innately connected to global markets. The exhibition challenges both the widely held ideas of the “anonymous African artist” and assumptions that masquerade is an unchanging, static art form solely rooted in the distant past.
New African Masquerades shares the stories of four masquerade artists: Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa (Nigeria), David Sanou (Burkina Faso), Sheku “Goldenfinger” Fofanah (Sierra Leone), and Hervé Youmbi (Cameroon), exploring their motivations, their artistic choices, the patronage and economic networks with which they engage, and how the artists adapt their respective genres in response to current circumstances and changing trends, locally and globally. This exhibition is rooted in humanist ideas, driven by ethical considerations in working with living artists from previously colonized spaces, and is a focused effort to foster meaningful engagements with public audiences and communities on both sides of the Atlantic.•
