African Diaspora

Art about the histories, beliefs and identities of people of African descent dispersed across the Americas, Europe and beyond.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for African Diaspora are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Art of the African diaspora traces the lives, faiths and memories of people whose ancestors were carried from Africa by the Atlantic slave trade, and of later migrants to Europe and the Americas. Yoruba and Kongo religious traditions survived in Cuba, Brazil and Haiti, and artists drew on them directly: Wifredo Lam fused Afro-Cuban ritual with modernist form in The Jungle (1943), Belkis Ayón built a dark, layered cosmology from the Abakuá brotherhood in her collographs, and Rubem Valentim turned Candomblé emblems into crisp geometry.

In the United States, Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series (1940–41) followed Black Southerners moving north in sixty small panels. Later artists question how identity is made and sold. Yinka Shonibare dresses figures in Dutch wax-print cloth, a fabric with European and Indonesian roots long taken as African, and Simone Leigh's bronze Brick House (2019) gives a woman's body the form of African clay dwellings.