This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how creativity can inspire in challenging times.
At a time when the Trump administration has dismantled programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, prompting many museums to rein in their race-conscious policies, the Museum of the African Diaspora is unapologetically pressing forward in its mission to center artists of African descent.
On Oct. 1, the museum, known as MoAD, reopened after a six-month renovation, and it is now marking its 20th anniversary with a new mission statement and an ambitious nearly one-yearlong exhibition that explores the intersections of Blackness and the cosmos: “UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe.”
“We’re staying true to our roots while evolving,” said Monetta White, the executive director and chief executive, in a phone interview, “creating programs that speak to both the imagination and the lived realities of our community. I’m really proud of what we’ve built.”
The reopening includes a smaller exhibition, “Continuum: MoAD Over Time,” that looks back at the museum’s history, examining archival materials, artworks and signature initiatives — such as the Emerging Artists Program, MoAD in the Classroom and the institution’s splashy annual fund-raiser, the Afropolitan Ball.
The museum’s reopening coincided with the second iteration of Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, a celebration of Black visual culture. MoAD started Nexus last year, partly to help rejuvenate San Francisco’s downtown, which is home to the museum, SFMOMA and a cluster of other cultural institutions, and was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. At the height of the crisis, the museum shut down, laid off seven staff members (three of whom it said were eventually rehired) and reduced the hours of remaining employees.
The museum — a scrappy institution with a comparatively small operating budget of about $7 million, a full-time staff of just 16, no endowment and a modest annual attendance of 40,000 — has arguably helped pave the way for cultural efforts across the nation that have focused on the African diaspora.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute show in the spring explored Black style through the concept of dandyism and the intersection of African and European traditions.
The Museum at F.I.T. in Manhattan last year presented “Africa’s Fashion Diaspora,” an exhibition that examined works from designers of African descent.
In 2023, the Philadelphia Museum of Art created a new center dedicated to the study, acquisition and care of art from Africa and the African diaspora. And The Africa Center in East Harlem has been exploring how Americans interact with the African continent.
Through its Emerging Artists Program, established in 2015, MoAD has become an important supporter of local talent.
“It felt as though my work had found its home,” said Mary W.D. Graham, a 25-year-old San Francisco artist who was chosen through the program last year for an exhibition of oil portraits of Black women on brown paper bags. “To receive recognition on an institutional level this early in my career was a boon to my professional practice.”
Graham added that the museum serves a crucial role, not only in the San Francisco cultural landscape, but in the field overall. “It creates a record of the past and future of the African diaspora and highlights the incredible diversity of our experiences,” she said. “Within the context of an art world which is still not totally equitable, it is critical that an institution like MoAD exists to provide opportunities for artists of color to thrive.”
MoAD’s former mission statement defined the institution as a “contemporary art museum that celebrates Black cultures, ignites challenging conversations, and inspires learning through the global lens of the African diaspora.” The new one: “To place the contemporary art and artists of the African Diaspora at the center of the global cultural conversation.”
White said the change was subtle but important: “We’re telling the story differently.”
The exhibition “UNBOUND,” which runs through Aug. 16 and takes up much of the museum, looks at how Black artists have used cosmology as source material.
“Artists not only reflect universal knowledge,” said Key Jo Lee, the chief of curatorial affairs and public programs who organized the exhibition, “but can also create new knowledge and understanding of cosmology — this kind of human drive toward understanding our place in the universe.”
The works on display include 20th-century Dogon statues made by inhabitants of a cliff region near the Niger River in Mali; Lorna Simpson’s monumental ink-drenched painting, “Blue Turned Temporal” (2019); digital works by the Ghanaian Moroccan artist David Alabo; and a holographic African mask by Rashaad Newsome.
“I tried to both be as expansive as possible, but also create a space for people to have points of entry,” Lee said, describing the show’s three core themes: Geo-Cartographic, which looks at Blackness mapped across earthly and celestial terrains; Religio-Mythic, examining Blackness as origin, cosmology and creation story; and Techno-Cyborgian, exploring Blackness shaped by technology and the ability to move fluidly between identities.
In many ways, Lee said, the show embodies the museum’s newly defined mission to not “just showcase artists of the African diaspora,” but to “position their ideas, their aesthetics and their intellectual frameworks as central to some of the most urgent and expansive conversations in global contemporary art today.”
At a time when cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian have been criticized by the Trump administration for being too “woke,” MoAD — itself a Smithsonian affiliate, which gives it access to the Smithsonian’s artifact collection — might be expected to want to avoid drawing attention to itself.
In the past, MoAD has received $500,000 annually for education programs from the federal government, as well as $250,000 annually for the Emerging Artists Program. In calendar year 2025, it will receive no federal funding, according to the museum.
Lee said the museum’s identity clearly ran counter to a president seeking to eliminate diversity programs. But she was not shying away from potentially provocative subject matter. “I kind of have an inability to keep my head down,” she said. “I am Black. I am a woman. I am doing this work and this is work that we’ve always been doing.
“In some ways, yes, I am fearful of what the impact will be of losing these really important departments, departments that also trained me,” she added. “What does it mean for us to meet this moment — not from a place of fear but from a place of fullness?”
Although San Francisco continues to build back from the pandemic, White said she was hopeful about its prospects under a new mayor, Daniel Lurie — whom she described as “very supportive of the arts” — while acknowledging that there are still challenges.
She added that part of the motivation for establishing Nexus, the weeklong fall festival, was “showing that we’re still strong, that we’re activating the city, that we’re representing artists.”
Pamela Joyner, a prominent collector and longtime San Francisco art patron, commended the museum’s contributions under White, who became director in 2019. “She has successfully implemented a number of innovations that knit MoAD to the community in a way that should prove to make the institution vibrant and viable for the long term,” Joyner said.
The current political climate would seem to make the museum’s future more fragile. But White said such headwinds made MoAD even more necessary.
“This is a time where we have to double down and count on our community,” she said. “If we want to see the world we want to see, we have to do our part to make sure it happens.”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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