On View: Exhibitions in 2025

Here are seven must-see shows featuring African artists that you should add to your calendar for 2025. 

On view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art is celebrated Nigerian sculptor and printmaker Bruce Onobrakpeya’s first major solo exhibition at a museum in the United States. Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Mask and the Cross features works by the artist from 1966 through 1978, a period when he completed multiple commissions for the Catholic Church, including his seminal “Fourteen Stations of the Cross” series. The exhibition also recognizes Onobrakpeya’s legacy—inspiring generations of visual artists in Nigeria—with artworks from the museum’s collection that reflect Onobrakpeya’s influence. A section of the exhibition developed exclusively for the National Museum of African Art features works by Onobrakpeya’s contemporaries represented in the museum’s collection. 

‍What We Carry to Set Ourselves Free is a solo project by Ethiopian-American artist Helina Metaferia that engages both the interior and exterior of the Museum of the African Diaspora. Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist who works with collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work integrates archives, somatic studies, and dialogical practices to support often overlooked narratives of intersectional identities. ‍What We Carry to Set Ourselves Free is a research-based project and an extension of the artist’s ongoing By Way of Revolution series, which foregrounds the often-overlooked labor of BIPOC women and gender-marginalized people within activist histories, and their continued contributions within today’s social justice movements. 

The artworks in this exhibition are part of the 29 objects that were legally transferred to their country of origin, Nigeria, by the Smithsonian Institution in fall 2022. The eight works in the exhibition include a very rare late-15th-century copper alloy trophy head, most likely of a defeated enemy, one of the earliest known examples of this genre of figurate cast sculpture from the kingdom. Also includes a large architectural plaque depicting a group of warriors and possibly an oba (ruler or king) himself, a variety of larger-scale copper alloy figural sculptures, two enormous engraved ivory tusks that were once part of the palace’s ancestral shrines, and a figure portraying a female attendant to a queen mother.

Inspired by the daily life in Nairobi, Kenyan painter Kaloki Nyamai explores the potential for new realities in his latest series, Ithokoo masuiluni. He uncovers and proposes narratives of an awaited morning that promises new beginnings. This body of work is both visually striking and thematically profound, addressing the complex relationship between historical trauma, current social unrest, and the hope for regeneration. In these large-scale installations, Nyamai creates a platform where the past, present, and future converge poetically.  His work makes use of youth-led uprisings and resistance as a central theme for his works, using scenes from protest actions around the world, including Kenya, Bangladesh, and Nigeria as a key visual motif. 

Being There is an exhibition featuring four recently acquired Thomas Gainsborough portraits and 18 contemporary artists including Michael Armitage and Joy Labinjo. The four portraits by artist Thomas Gainsborough, painted circa 1763, depict members of the prominent Tugwell family from Bradford on Avon: clothier Humphrey Tugwell, his wife, Elizabeth, and sons William and Thomas. The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the experience of artists and their sitters or subjects in the act of making the artwork and to consider what similarities and differences there may be for the role of the artist in Gainsborough’s time and today. The exhibition is the first in The Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent’s ambitious new program of contemporary art exhibitions. 

Keeping Time is a group exhibition showing international and Ghana-based artists from the African diaspora who are exploring notions of Blackness, being, and time in their works. By presenting artworks that are both dream-like and speculative, abstract and figurative, the exhibition questions and disrupts our sense of being in the world through African diasporic perceptions of time. Conceived as a follow-up to In and Out of Time, the 2023 Gallery 1957 exhibition curated by Ekow Eshun, which was founded on a similar scepticism to linear notions of progress and modernity, Keeping Time presents works that invoke African diasporic perceptions of time as the inspiration for works of expansive dreaming and possibility.

The show introduces artists who are exhibiting with Gallery 1957 for the first time, such as Okiki Akinfe, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Alvaro Barrington, Winston Branch, Kenwyn Crichlow, Kimathi Donkor, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Lyle Ashton Harris, Andrew Pierre Hart, Che Lovelace, Sola Olulode, Sikelela Owen, Ravelle Pillay, Elias Sime, Lina Iris Viktor and Michaela Yearwood-Dan, as well as returning artists Gideon Appah, Rita Mawuena Benissan, Amoako Boafo, Phoebe Boswell, Godfried Donkor, Modupeola Fadugba, Julianknxx, Arthur Timothy, and Alberta Whittle.

Where I Belong unveils a body of work illustrative of Nigerian contemporary artist Deborah Segun’s journey of withdrawal to a somewhat monotonous, quiet, and calmer lifestyle in contrast to an emergent hustle and bustle. Her series of works are drawn from focusing on the idea of change and adaptability and share her nostalgic experience of moving back to the United Kingdom, a place the artist once considered to be a home away from home, but which now feels entirely different to her due to change and time. It documents the process of her starting all over and reprogramming herself to be more in tune with her surroundings, which led her to engage with her “inner child” and confront past traumas. Segun adopts a deconstructive approach to project fragmented female faces and figures as silhouettes in contemplation and repose. Her paintings are rendered in a minimalist delicateness that alternates pale shades of colors outlining her subjects with flatness and calm.