In autumn 2022 the Lagos, Nigeria-based sculptor Ndidi Dike presented The Politics of Selection, a new archival research-based immersive collage installation, at Fisk University, a historically Black institution in Nashville, Tennessee.¹ The work has been commissioned for the exhibition African Modernism in America, 1947–1967, which opened in Nashville before travelling to three additional venues in 2023 through 2024.² Dike’s project for the exhibition investigates the material presence and absence of women in the story of African modernity and expands out from an examination of one of the major archives of African modernism, the Harmon Foundation Papers at the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, DC. Dike’s work activates the histories presented in the exhibition and invites reflection on their relevance today.

The Harmon Foundation archive and collection of modern African art form the foundation of African Modernism in America, the first major travelling exhibition to examine the complex connections between modern African artists and American patrons, artists and cultural organisations amid the interlocking histories of civil rights, decolonisation and the Cold War. During these years, institutions such as the New York-based Harmon Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (known as HBCUs) like Fisk, Hampton University in Virginia, Howard University in Washington, DC, and Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, collected and exhibited works by many of the most important African artists of the mid-twentieth century, including Ben Enwonwu (Nigeria), Gerard Sekoto (South Africa), Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan) and Skunder Boghossian (Ethiopia). The inventive and irrefutably contemporary nature of these artists’ paintings, sculptures and works on paper defied typical Western narratives about African art being isolated to a “primitive” past, and their presentation in the United States rooted their vital work firmly in the present for American audiences. The show reveals a transcontinental network of artists, curators and scholars that challenges assumptions about African art in the United States, and thereby encourages American engagement with African artists as contemporaries.

It comes as no surprise, I imagine, that the well-known modern African artists listed above are men. Their work, which grappled with pan-African visual languages and concepts, is important and has been the deserving subject of crucial art historical studies in recent decades. Yet the names and work of their contemporary women artists are lesser known and their careers more rarely treated with scholarly rigour. Why? In pursuing historical and archival research on modern art from Africa, one confronts the existing and pervasive gender imbalance almost unavoidably in the existing scholarship and institutional archives. Still, there is information to be found if one commits to deliberate attention and to giving space and time to the stories of the women who are present in the known archives. Dike is invested in such work. For her commission, she thus focuses, in the development of modernism and the narratives around its presentation, the forms of their silencing, and their strategies of visibility.