"Entryways: Nontsikelelo Mutiti" is the inaugural project for a new series that commissions artists to activate the façade of ICA’s building in partnership with Maharam, North America’s leading creator of textiles for commercial and residential interiors. For the 2024 edition, ICA invited Nontsikelelo Mutiti, a Zimbabwean-born visual artist and educator, to reimagine the windows. In the resulting work, Mutiti combined African hair braiding patterns and hair clips with symbols often found in ironwork. Mutiti is deeply interested in the cultures and communities that are formed in hair salons globally, and often incorporates braids in her work as markers of identity, migration, and culture. Similarly, the use of symbols in ironwork, particularly Adinkra symbols from West Africa, are present visually almost everywhere these decorative architectural features are found. These forms were first created by enslaved blacksmiths from West Africa and have become a shared diasporic visual language. The designs are now found across the African diaspora including in Philadelphia and the broader United States. In the same way that hair braiders continue the practice of these braiding systems, ironworkers, and now restoration workers, ensure the survival and persistence of these symbols as important cultural markers." -

Noah Davis presents a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Noah Davis, whose paintings combine intimate storytelling with expansive social commentary. Davis’s practice is characterized by dreamlike imagery, poetic narratives, and a deep engagement with everyday life, particularly within Black communities. Through figurative painting that often blends realism with surreal or ambiguous elements, Davis created emotionally resonant scenes that explore memory, family, history, and the complexity of contemporary experience. The exhibition brings together works spanning the artist’s career, highlighting Davis’s ability to merge personal reflection with broader cultural narratives. His paintings frequently depict quiet moments—figures resting, gathering, or moving through spaces—while suggesting deeper psychological and historical dimensions. These scenes invite viewers to consider how ordinary life intersects with collective memory and social history. This presentation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art marks the final venue of the artist’s first international institutional retrospective. The exhibition previously traveled to Das Minsk Kunsthaus in Potsdam in fall 2024, the Barbican Centre in spring 2025, and the Hammer Museum in summer 2025. Together, these presentations situate Davis’s work within a global conversation about contemporary painting and reaffirm his enduring influence on a new generation of artists.

Freedom Dreams is on view at the Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130, from April 12, 2026 through August 9, 2026. The exhibition features works by Arthur Jafa, David Hartt, Garrett Bradley, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Tourmaline, whose practices span film, video, and installation. As Philadelphia and the nation approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, the exhibition centers the memories, dreams, and histories of Black Americans through moving-image works that engage history, archives, and cultural memory. Co-curated by Maori Karmael Holmes, Chief Executive and Artistic Officer of BlackStar Projects, and James Claiborne, Fleischner Family Deputy Director for Community Engagement at the Barnes, Freedom Dreams emphasizes the fluid boundary between past, present, and future. Across the exhibition, the artists consider how Americans of color have shaped identities and created spaces of resistance, joy, and resilience in the face of systemic oppression.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey features work by Xenobia Bailey, a Philly-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice is rooted in fiber arts, crochet, design, and Black cultural histories. For this 2025–26 edition of ICA’s collaboration with Maharam, Bailey created Cosmic-Roots, a façade installation composed of digitized crochet forms that draw on histories of Black domestic workers, including the artist’s mother, while honoring figures important to African American cultural continuity. Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 118 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Runs July 12, 2025 to August 9, 2026. The installation includes references to the 1836 American Anti-Slavery Almanac, land-based knowledge held by sharecroppers and free Black families, and the musician-philosopher Sun Ra, who appears within a cosmic scene shaped by rhythm, joy, and ancestral presence. ICA describes the work as animated by Bailey’s “Funk-tional Design” language and as extending her interest in everyday objects, ceremony, and Black expressive traditions.

"The more than 60 contemporary works featured in this exhibition unfold around three core themes: Double Consciousness, Past and Presence and Our Aliveness. Double Consciousness, a theory first introduced in 1897 by the African American sociologist W.E.B Du Bois, explores concepts of being, belonging and Blackness as a psychological state. Past and Presence explores the absence of Black figures in many mainstream narratives and shows how artists have responded. Our Aliveness features assertions and celebrations of Black assembly and gathering. Traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art from the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Black and African diasporic artists in this exhibition work in the U.S. and the U.K. They include Michael Armitage, Claudette Johnson, Kerry James Marshall, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Amy Sherald. For the show’s U.S. premiere, additional artists working in Philadelphia, London, and New York have been added, including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Roberto Lugo, Danielle Mckinney, Deborah Roberts, and Arthur Timothy." - PMA