Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa contributes to the complex and multivocal narratives around African modernism. The exhibition pays critical attention to the first generation of African architects who were foundationally involved in the creation of an architectural identity that resonated with the forward-looking and aspirational ideas embraced by leaders of newlyindependent states. The exhibition does not seek to present an exhaustive survey of modern architecture in the region, nor does it chart the specific trajectories of each nation state after their respective declarations of independence. Rather, the exhibition sheds light on the shared issues and concerns in each of these newly independent nations by articulating an architectural language of self-determination that sought to adapt, adopt, or reinvent the idiom of modernism for their specific cultural, political, economic purposes, and to their climatic conditions as well.

Cocurating the exhibition is professor Ikem S. Okoye of the University of Delaware, who specializes in painting, sculpture, and architecture of West Africa, and their linked spaces and landscapes elsewhere: in the art and architecture of other regions of Africa, including Central Africa and the Nile Valley, as well as the Caribbean, the American South, Imperial Europe, and Brazil. Okoye is director of the university’s African Studies Program and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Black American Studies and the Islamic Studies Program. Okoye’s work has been recognized by a membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a fellowship at the Institute for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin, and the Advanced Study Center at the University of Michigan. He was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern University, where he taught subsequently for several years.

Martino Stierli, curator of this exhibition, is The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Stierli oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design. At MoMA, he has curated the exhibitions Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 (2018); Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China (2021); and The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 (2022). Stierli also oversaw the installation of the new Architecture and Design collection galleries in the expanded MoMA, which opened in October 2019, and curated numerous collection installations. Stierli is the author of Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity and the Representation of Space (Yale University Press, 2018) and Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Getty Publications, 2013).

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in 1929 by three visionary women who saw a need to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums and establish an institution devoted exclusively to modern art. The Museum’s collection, which began as eight prints and one drawing, has since grown to include over 250,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural and design objects, and, most recently, dance and performance works, making it one of the most expansive collections of modern and contemporary art in the world. MoMA connects people from around the world to the art of our time. MoMA aspires to be a catalyst of experimentation, learning, and creativity, a gathering place for all, and a home for artists and their ideas.