" Sourced from a combination of taken and found imagery, the paintings rely on the sense of the familiar and the hope that a wide range of people will see themselves in the works, feeling welcome to spend time with them. Labinjo often depicts intimate moments, both real and imagined, and often based on figures appearing in family photographs, found images and historical or archival material. In the past, she has explored themes such as identity, political voice, power, Blackness, race, history, community and family and their role in contemporary experience. Her distinctive painting style presents fresh and arresting compositions of colour, pattern and motifs. Fundamentally at the heart of Labinjo’s practice is a bold interest in storytelling and, ultimately, people’s lives." -Snippet from the exhibition.

"Focused on the intricate dynamics of visibility and authority, "Talking Back to Power" proposes a reclamation of black visibility. C. Rose Smith’s evocative black and white self-portraits revolve around the white cotton shirt, staged at locations affiliated with the wealth generated from cotton plantations in the Southern United States of America. During the 19th century, cotton was one of the most lucrative global commodities. Built on the forced labor of millions of enslaved Africans, plantation complexes that grew, cultivated and sold this crop formed the basis of monumental economic advancement and progress. Throughout her photographs, Smith fashions a crisp white button-up shirt, a potent emblem of both exploitation and respectability. She poses in opulently decorated antebellum homes in Tennessee, South Carolina and Louisiana, by-products of the wealth amassed by the owners of cotton plantations. Entrenched throughout these buildings is the lingering spectre of the magnitude of violence and anguish that is inextricably linked to chattel slavery. Despite many undergoing meticulous restorations and now serving as tourist destinations, these buildings bear witness to the enduring legacy of human suffering." - Press Release

"A thought-provoking exploration of rebellion and transformation, Deadweight comprises four large-scale sculptural works which continue the artist’s interest in creating new worlds for ‘Blackness’ and fascination with the metaphoric potency and regenerative power of the sea. The title Deadweight derives from a nautical term which collapses everything on a ship into a single unit which determines the ship’s ability to float and function as intended. White deliberately inverts this, offering disruption as opposed to stability – a reckoning with the tipping point of the ship to offer the possibility of emancipation through abolition. The works combine force and fragility: undulating angular structures formed from metals manipulated into forms evocative of anchors, a ship’s hull, mammal carcasses or skeletons – lost or abandoned material forms that, through White’s treatment, become symbols of defiance." -Excerpt from Press Release.

"In a new exhibition this autumn, Autograph will present never-before-seen works from the artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode's wider practice. These photographs delve into ideas of theatre, performance, studio and community – depicting radical forms of black bodily expression. During a tragically brief career, Fani-Kayode used photography to explore themes of race, sexuality, spirituality and the self. He masterfully staged and crafted portraits visualising black queer self-expression. Prominent in the Black British art scene in the 1980s, he remains an important figure in art history." - Autograph

"Incorporating the Ethiopian Modernist tradition of including Amharic alphabetic script in paintings, Tadesse interprets the human figures as a type of lettering, the figures echoing the vertical loops and angles of Amharic text. In this way, the subjects of his work can be perceived as their own type of meaning makers, not merely passive beings, but actively participating in the creation of their environment. In the artist’s words, ‘through repetition they have become my symbols, my language.’" -Exhibition Excerpt

"An Awkward Relation is a new exhibition from interdisciplinary artist Sonia Boyce (b.1962, London, UK). It is conceived to be in dialogue with the exhibition of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, The I and the You, showing at the Gallery concurrently. The exhibition brings together a number of pivotal and rarely seen works to explore themes of interaction, participation and improvisation – all of which have played a definitive role in Boyce’s practice since the 1990s and reflect a shared interest with many of the radical approaches that Clark pioneered in her own work. Boyce was introduced to Clark’s work in the 1990s and felt a strong synergy with the Brazilian artist’s experiential and participatory practice. An Awkward Relation explores the feelings of both involvement and uneasiness intrinsic to an approach that invites visitors to engage, touch and experience artworks and their surroundings in new and unscripted ways. The title of the exhibition is indicative of this complex, often difficult, relationship between artists, works and audiences. It also recognises that while there are similarities between Boyce and Clark’s work, there are also clear differences, which necessarily, and inevitably, stem from the very different artistic, geographical and socio-political contexts in which the artists were working, as well as the specific intentions behind what they were doing." -Excerpt from Press Release

"Larkin Durey is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by Lavar Munroe. This is the artist’s tenth solo show with the gallery. Lavar Munroe works in the spirit of an anthropologist, studying the human condition via intensive, immersive travels across the African continent and a similar sense of discovery in his studio. His work attests to the power of storytelling, folklore, fable and community, illuminating the threads that weave us together across culture, time and geography, and spark our collective imagination."-Excerpt from Press Release

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair is the first and only international art fair dedicated to showcasing visual artists of the African Diasporas. 1-54 London is the finale of the tri-annual art fair, talking place at Somerset House; the fair will be held in the West, East, South and Embankment galleries. 1-54 London will coincide with Frieze London.

"Operated by husband-and-wife duo John Abe and Funmilayo Abe the studio thrived from the 1970s to 2006. The exhibition Spirit of Lagos focuses on the studio’s formative decade — the 1970s. Unlike many African portrait studios of that era, the Abes carved out a unique photographic vocation: few female practitioners or collaborators in this context were named and worked so prolifically in a male-dominated field. Merging their professional and personal lives, the couple balanced raising a large family while running a successful commercial photographic studio." -Autograph

Inspired by David Abram's 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous, Each Place Its Own Mind examines how human consciousness has become detached from the natural world. The exhibition presents historic works alongside new commissions, offering distinct experiential perspectives that challenge the Enlightenment-era separation of culture and nature. Through diverse mediums such as drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and film, the exhibition delves into themes of indigenous knowledge, ecological research, and the reimagining of our relationship with the living world. Highlights include Mirtha Dermisache's asemic writing, Anna Hulačová's sculptures incorporating honeycomb interiors, and Bronwyn Katz's installations utilizing natural materials like iron ore and rose quartz. Collectively, these works invite viewers to reconsider the interconnected web of experiences shared by all entities within a given space.

Derrick Adams’ Situation Comedy delves into the intersection of humor, identity, and representation, drawing inspiration from television sitcoms and their influence on collective memory. His signature use of vibrant acrylics and fabric collages transforms familiar scenes of domestic life, social gatherings, and leisure into layered reflections on race, performance, and personal agency. Adams plays with the comedic structure of conflict and resolution, using fragmented compositions that suggest both the comfort and complexity of these narratives. By reimagining sitcom aesthetics within the fine art space, Situation Comedy offers a fresh perspective on how entertainment shapes cultural consciousness and the portrayal of Black life.

Noah Davis’s deeply atmospheric paintings explore everyday Black experiences through a lens that is both tender and surreal. Influenced by artists like Peter Doig and Francis Bacon, Davis developed a distinctive style where figures dissolve into hazy, fragmented landscapes, evoking memory, spirituality, and the passage of time. His works—often depicting family life, urban interiors, and moments of solitude—carry an emotional weight that lingers beyond the canvas. Alongside his paintings, the exhibition highlights Davis’s groundbreaking role in establishing the Underground Museum a space dedicated to making museum-quality art accessible to underserved communities in Los Angeles. This exhibition not only honors Davis’s artistic genius but also his dedication to cultural accessibility and social change.

Belonging In-Between marks the opening of Tiwani Contemporary Lagos's 2025 exhibition program, featuring new works by London-based artist Emma Prempeh. The exhibition delves into Prempeh's exploration of landscape as both physical and emotionally charged sites, drawing upon the memories and experiences of her grandmother and mother, Carmen. Central to the series is Carmen's return to St. Vincent, capturing the emotional landscapes tied to familial experiences and diasporic belonging Prempeh's paintings are characterized by their rich, cinematic quality, often depicting figures, interiors, and natural elements that blur the lines between memory and reality. She employs materials such as oil, acrylic, and schlag metal—a brass alloy imitative of gold leaf—which oxidizes over time, symbolizing the fluidity and transformation of memory.

Amoako Boafo's I Do Not Come to You by Chance marks his first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, showcasing a new body of work that continues his exploration of Black identity, intimacy, and self-determination. The exhibition incorporates paintings into a transformative and involving design conceived by the artist in collaboration with architect and designer Glenn DeRoche. Boafo's distinctive technique of finger-painting brings a tactile quality to his portraits, capturing the essence of his subjects with expressive strokes. The exhibition includes a recreated version of his childhood courtyard, symbolizing community and memory, and serving as a central element that ties together the themes of the show. ​ Through this immersive installation, Boafo invites viewers to engage with his personal journey and the broader narratives of the African diaspora, challenging stereotypes and celebrating the richness of Black culture.

The sculptures, assembled as peaceful emissaries from the spirit realm, invite introspection during Venus retrograde—mirroring her withdrawal from the sky and re-emergence. Inanna (the Sumerian Venus) guides the underlying narrative of descent, challenge, release, and calm. Lewis employs experimental and playful processes in mask-making, sourcing natural pigments (beetroot, hibiscus, turmeric) and applying repurposed textiles, beads, leather, and fragments from earlier works. These materials underscore renewal and multi-layered storytelling. The exhibition’s title echoes a chant meant to comfort Inanna during her descent: “The ways of the underworld are perfect.” These intangible, body-less talismans embody chaotic yet magnetic energies tied to mythic, psychological, and spiritual realms.

Pindell's revolutionary approach extends beyond personal healing to collective awakening. Her systematic deconstruction of traditional compositional structures mirrors her dismantling of racial and gender hierarchies, revealing how artistic conventions can be reimagined to serve more inclusive narratives. Through painstaking accumulation and subtraction, addition and erasure, she creates works that pulse with the rhythm of survival and the poetry of persistence. "I endeavoured to change the circle in my mind... to take the sting out of the memory," Pindell has said. This exhibition reveals how she has done far more than remove the sting—she has transformed it into honey, creating art that is both deeply personal and universally resonant, proving that our greatest wounds can become our most powerful sources of creation.

in Nigeria across the twentieth century. Tate frames the exhibition around cultural and artistic rebellion, following artists working before and after independence and highlighting the ways they engaged local histories, international exchange, formal experimentation, and political transformation. Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG, United Kingdom. October 8, 2025 — Runs through May 10, 2026. The exhibition guide notes that each room focuses on different artists, societies, and art schools, showing how Nigerian modernism emerged through dialogue between Indigenous knowledge, academic training, pan-African thought, and global modernist currents. The exhibition includes artists such as Uzo Egonu, Demas Nwoko, Yusuf Grillo, Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, Afi Ekong, Erhabor Emokpae, Bruce Onobrakpeya, and Twins Seven-Seven.

This retrospective spans four decades of Marshall’s career and introduces a major new body of paintings created specially for the exhibition. Organised thematically into eleven cycles, the show explores the artist’s evolving engagement with art-historical tropes, Black identity, myth, society and narrative ambition. From early works like A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) to the 23-foot mural Knowledge and Wonder (1995) and fresh series such as Africa Revisited, Marshall asks: What happens when the Black figure is no longer marginalised but central? With brilliant colour, deep formal control, and layered cultural reference, the exhibition underscores his mission of crafting a “counter-archive” to traditional Western painting.

“Catching Flies with Honey” explores the nuanced interplay of identity, beauty, race, and history through Joy Gregory’s wide-ranging artistry—from silver-gelatin self-portraits of the late 1980s to cyanotypes, textile installations, film works and new commissions. The title references a proverb Gregory’s mother taught her: “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” signalling her strategy of using visual seduction to engage with difficult subjects. The show moves through key series including Autoportrait (1989-90), Objects of Beauty (1992-95), Girl Thing (2002-04), The Blonde (1997-2010) and Seeds of Empire (2021), among others. It captures her experimental use of Victorian photographic processes, the politics of femininity and diaspora, and her persistent challenge to conventional narratives of beauty and belonging.

In Mémoires des corps, Messouma Manlanbien draws from her Guadeloupean, Ivorian and French heritage to create a multilayered installation that becomes both altar and archive. Using textiles, drawing, sculpture, video-performance and installation, she weaves fabric, shells, metals and everyday objects into symbolic environs of repair and reverence. One of the key works features room-sized curtains of carnelian, pink opal, moonstone and amber—traditionally healing stones—paired with new tapestries depicting female bodies, bees, and reproductive organs. The exhibition reflects on the traumas experienced by women from former French colonies and how these echo across generations. Messouma Manlanbien imagines the gallery as a body in recovery, offering space for remembering, healing and affirmation.

“Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025” revisits and expands the legacy of the trail-blazing 1985 exhibition “The Thin Black Line.” The show presents both historical and contemporary works by the original cohort of Black and Asian women artists, tracing their evolving practices over four decades. Highlights include Boyce’s Rice n Peas (1982) and new neon work by Burman and sculpture by Smith. The exhibition also features archival material—photographs, correspondence and documents from the 1985 show—alongside six new commissions and a full programme of film, music and performance events throughout the summer.

For All At Last Return at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art is conceived as a global expedition through marine habitats. Drawing on the foundations of ecological art practice, the exhibition traces the shifting boundaries between land and sea, surface and depth, and human impact versus natural agency. Works in the show examine coral reefs, intertidal zones, open waters and deep-sea ecologies through diverse media including sculpture, photography and expanded installation formats.  Artists participating in the exhibition investigate multiple facets of human-ocean entanglement: environmental violence, resource extraction, indigenous and local ecological knowledge, and potential pathways for regeneration. The works reflect collaborations with scientists and communities, situating artistic inquiry alongside marine biology, oceanography, and climate data.  By juxtaposing historical narratives with contemporary environmental crises, the exhibition encourages visitors to consider the ocean as both participant and witness in human history. Themes of extraction, resistance and memory are interwoven with aesthetic explorations of form and material, making For All At Last Return both a sensory and intellectual encounter with the pressing realities of global marine systems.

Portals to Place: Three Papunya Tula Artists brings together new, previously unseen works by Yukultji Napangati, Lorna Ward Napanangka, and John West Tjupurrula—three senior artists associated with the Papunya Tula movement. The exhibition situates their practices within the broader history of the Western Desert art movement, which emerged in the early 1970s and has since become one of the most internationally recognized Indigenous Australian art traditions. Through dense, undulating compositions of dots and lines, the artists translate ancestral narratives and sacred knowledge tied to specific sites within their Country. These works function as visual maps that encode spiritual, geographical, and ceremonial information. The shimmering surfaces and rhythmic mark-making evoke both landscape and cosmology, collapsing distinctions between abstraction and cartography. Presented by Edel Assanti in London, Portals to Place underscores the continued vitality of Papunya Tula painting and its capacity to articulate enduring relationships to land, memory, and intergenerational transmission. The exhibition runs through 16 May 2026 in London.

Thornton Dial: From Bessemer to the Cosmos presents a focused exhibition of works by Thornton Dial, whose practice spanned assemblage, painting, and sculpture. Working primarily with found and salvaged materials—metal, wire, wood, industrial debris, fabric, and paint—Dial constructed layered compositions that addressed civil rights, economic inequality, war, environmental devastation, and spiritual transcendence. The exhibition title signals the breadth of Dial’s vision: rooted in Bessemer, Alabama—his hometown and a center of industrial labor—yet reaching toward universal and cosmic concerns. Dial’s dense surfaces and complex assemblages combine abstraction and figuration, often embedding symbolic imagery within richly textured compositions. His work operates simultaneously as social commentary and metaphysical reflection, bridging the personal, political, and spiritual. Presented by Edel Assanti in London, From Bessemer to the Cosmos underscores Dial’s significance within American art history and the broader canon of contemporary assemblage. The exhibition runs through 14 March 2026.

Simone Leigh presents the largest exhibition to date of the work of Simone Leigh, a New York–based sculptor internationally recognized for her monumental sculptures and installations. For her first major exhibition in the United Kingdom, Leigh will take over the Royal Academy’s Main Galleries at Burlington House, presenting an ambitious body of work that includes bronze and ceramic sculpture alongside film and large-scale installations. Leigh’s practice draws deeply from African artistic traditions and the cultures of the African diaspora, centering the histories, labor, and lived experiences of Black women. Her sculptures often combine references to vernacular architecture, ritual objects, and historical forms of portraiture, transforming them into powerful contemporary monuments. Through these works, Leigh addresses themes of visibility, care, resilience, and collective memory. For the Royal Academy exhibition, Leigh will debut new monumental works created specifically for the galleries, expanding her ongoing exploration of form, material, and cultural symbolism. By bringing together sculpture, installation, and film, the exhibition offers a comprehensive view of the artist’s evolving practice and underscores her influence within contemporary art. The exhibition runs through December 12, 2027, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Senga Nengudi: Performance Works 1972–1982 presents a focused look at a pivotal decade in Nengudi's career and examines the formative years of Senga Nengudi’s practice, during which she developed her distinctive approach at the intersection of sculpture, performance, and choreography. Featuring photographic documentation, films, and archival materials, the exhibition offers a comprehensive view of works created between 1972 and 1982—a critical period in the artist’s evolution. The exhibition also reflects Nengudi’s involvement in experimental Black art communities, including Studio Z in Los Angeles and Just Above Midtown (JAM) in New York—spaces that fostered collaboration, improvisation, and new forms of artistic expression outside mainstream institutions. Presented by Whitechapel Gallery, this exhibition marks Nengudi’s first solo presentation in a public gallery in London, situating her work within a broader international context and highlighting its lasting influence on contemporary art.

Hurvin Anderson presents the first major solo exhibition of the artist’s work, offering a comprehensive overview of his practice across several decades. Known for his vibrant, color-saturated paintings, Anderson creates landscapes and interiors that reflect on memory, migration, and cultural identity. Born in the United Kingdom to Jamaican parents, Anderson’s work frequently navigates the space between the UK and the Caribbean. His paintings draw from personal experiences, family histories, and culturally significant sites—such as barbershops—while exploring the complexities of belonging and displacement. These spaces are often layered, combining multiple locations and temporalities into a single composition, emphasizing the fluid and unreliable nature of memory. Anderson’s paintings are distinguished by their atmospheric use of color, pattern, and spatial ambiguity. By engaging with and reinterpreting traditions of British landscape painting, he situates his work within art historical frameworks while simultaneously challenging and expanding them. Through this approach, Anderson addresses broader questions of identity, diaspora, and cultural inheritance. Presented at Tate Britain in London, this exhibition affirms Hurvin Anderson’s position as one of the most significant contemporary painters of his generation. The exhibition runs through August 23, 2026.

Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations presents one of the most extensive exhibitions to date of work by Veronica Ryan, the Freelands Award and Turner Prize-winning artist. Featuring more than 100 works across sculpture, textiles, and works on paper, the exhibition traces four decades of Ryan’s materially rich and psychologically resonant practice. The exhibition includes recently rediscovered works from the 1980s, including large-scale sculptures made from plaster and beaten lead as well as vivid drawings. Across these works, Ryan explores psychology, memory, personal narrative, and broader themes of environment, history, trauma, and recovery. Ryan is especially known for her sustained attention to seeds and pods, forms that can suggest protection, enclosure, growth, and transformation at once. Her practice combines traditional materials such as plaster, bronze, and marble with textile and craft-based processes including crochet and quilting, creating a visual language shaped by both formal experimentation and intergenerational inheritance. Whitechapel Gallery, 77–82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX, United Kingdom. Runs April 1, 2026 — June 14, 2026.