In the ongoing photographic project Somnyama Ngonyama—isiZulu for Hail the Dark Lioness—South African visual activist Zanele Muholi presents a visionary mosaic of identities, an exquisite empire of selves. This exhibition of more than seventy self-portraits from the series poses critical questions about social (in)justice, human rights, and contested representations of the Black body.

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is organized by Autograph, London. Curated by Renée Mussai.

Flooded McDonald’s (2008) is a film by the international artist collective SUPERFLEX. In the video, a life-size replica of the interior of a McDonald’s restaurant gradually floods. Furniture is lifted up by the water, trays of food and drinks start to float around, and electrical elements short circuit as the space is completely submerged and destroyed. Based in Denmark, Sweden, and Brazil, the members of SUPERFLEX investigate systems of power, globalization, and the social and environmental costs of consumer culture.

The nineteenth century was an innovative period in the history of printmaking. Many artists rejected traditionally taught practices and principles and established a new aesthetic language for prints that focused on design and craft. This exhibition brings works by American artist Arthur Wesley Dow into dialogue with other printmakers from the collection, namely Mary Cassatt, Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, and James McNeill Whistler.

On view for the first time in the United States, Theaster Gates’s Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories includes nearly 3,000 images from the Johnson Publishing Company archive. Founded in 1942, Chicago-based Johnson Publishing chronicled the lives of Black Americans for more than seven decades through the magazines Ebony and Jet. Gates’s work, composed from arguably the most important archive of American Black visual culture in the twentieth century, recontextualizes and makes visible anew these images and their histories. The presentation of this new body of work is drawn from Gates’s Black Madonna exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2018, part of his larger Black Image Corporation project. As Gates says, “‘The Black Image Corporation’ is about the projection of images into the world.” The work invites visitors to engage directly with these rich and varied representations depicting women in their everyday lives, historical moments, and studio poses.

Wiwenikan…the beauty we carry is an exhibition of contemporary art of the First Nations people of what is now Maine and Maritime Canada. Collectively known as the Wabanaki, the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Abenaki, our people have lived in and paddled through our homeland for thousands of years. Basketmakers, canoe makers, carvers, painters, and beadworkers, the artists in this exhibition carry the beauty of their ancestors and culture into the future.

Wiwenikan…the beauty we carry is guest curated by Jennifer Neptune, Penobscot basketmaker and beadworker; and Kathleen Mundell, director of Cultural Resources.