'Panafrica Across Chicago' celebrating Black history, culture in series of exhibits, events

About five years ago, two curators at the Art Institute of Chicago began conceiving a set of exhibitions centered on Pan-Africanism, a political and cultural movement that emerged at the beginning of 20th century and continues to the present.

As those discussions progressed, they teamed with two outside curators and reached out to other artists, scholars and institutions around Chicago, and the result is “Panafrica Across Chicago,” a loose-knit series of exhibitions and other events that will end March 5-8, 2025, with “Panafrica Days.” The event will be sponsored by the Art Institute, Chicago Humanities Festival, University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society and Northwestern University’s Black Arts Consortium.

“There was this just groundswell of enthusiasm for this project, which was lovely,” said Matthew Witkovsky, the Art Institute’s vice president for strategic art initiatives and Sandor Chair of Photography and Media.

Pan-Africanism has taken on many forms, but in general it seeks a worldwide solidarity among Africans and those of African ancestry and fosters a deeper awareness of Black history.

“Culture is central to this movement — literature, music and then soon after that, painting, the fine arts and, also very much, popular cultural expression,” Witkovsky said. “That is the part that this undertaking around the city and at the Art Institute is focusing on — cultural Pan-Africanism.”

The Art Institute is presenting five exhibitions as part of its segment of the project, ending Dec. 15-March 30 with the largest and most ambitious offering: “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica.”

The show in Regenstein Hall, the museum’s main temporary-exhibition gallery, will incorporate 350 objects by artists on four continents, probing the ever-shifting meaning of Pan-Africanism and offering a constellation of takes on the precepts of decolonization, solidarity and freedom.

On view now through Jan. 6, 2025 is “Screens: A Panafrica Film Series." Also on view/or planned is a mural in Griffin Court by London’s Otolith Group (now through March 30, 2025), an exhibition titled “After the End of the World: Pictures from Panafrica” (Nov. 2-April 21, 2025) and a film installation, “Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: The Crow, the Trench and the Mare” (Dec. 14-March 9, 2025).

Here is a look at five other Pan-African exhibitions taking place around Chicago:

— Through Dec. 15, "vanessa german," Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th (loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu). This is the first museum exhibition in Chicago featuring this self-taught artist whose work ventures into the realms of magic and spirituality. Shown here is an installation of monumental rose-quartz and gemstone sculptures she developed as a fellow at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.

— Through Dec. 20, "Dawit L. Petros: Prospetto a Mare," Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, 600 S. Michigan (mocp.org). Petros is an Eritrean-born Canadian artist who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As part of his long-term investigation into the impact of Italian colonialism in Africa, he explores in this show the fascist legacy of Chicago’s Balbo Monument and Balbo Avenue.

— Through March 16, 2025, “Theaster Gates: When Clouds Roll Away,” Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island (rebuild-foundation.org/exhibitions). Gates, an internationally known Chicago artist, will display a group of works inspired by the archive of the Johnson Publishing Co., which chronicled the lives of Black Americans in magazines like Ebony and Jet. He will imagine the three floors of the once-abandoned bank building that he converted into an art space as a contemporary Black publishing company in the spirit of Johnson.

— Jan. 23-April 2, 2025, “Cosmo Whyte: The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone,” Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario (artsclubchicago.org). In his first solo exhibition in Chicago, Los Angeles-based and Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte offers what organizers call an “interrogation into the spaces and forms of diasporic protest, spectacle and witnessing.”

— Jan. 30, 2025-April 18, 2025, "Betye Saar, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society," University of Chicago, 5701 S. Woodlawn (neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu). Saar, 98, has long been a major force in contemporary art who is best known for assemblages that draw on family and history. This show will focus on her wearable art, inspired in part by a visit to the Field Museum’s African collections in the 1970s.

For a complete listing of events surrounding “Panafrica across Chicago,” visit artic.edu/panafrica.