‘Africa Fashion’ Review: A Continent’s Creativity

The exhibition “Africa Fashion,” at the Brooklyn Museum, begins with context. In a long entryway, a timeline on the wall ticks off the year that each of Africa’s 54 nations won emancipation from outside rule, colonizers that included the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Italy. The first nation was Liberia, in 1847, and the last was South Sudan, in 2011. But it was 1960, known as the “Year of Africa,” that saw the dam burst: that year 17 nations achieved independence. By the end of the ’60s, 48 African nations were free. Self-government, self-expression, rebirth—Africa was happening.

Hence the second space in the show, titled “African Cultural Renaissance.” In this room the walls are lined with seminal books (plays, fiction, nonfiction) and record albums ( Fela Kuti, Miriam Makeba ). It’s a visual library that catches the continent’s midcentury energy—lyrical, intellectual, political. One of the books, “24 Poems,” is laid open. It was written by Africa’s first modern poet, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937), and posthumously published in 1962.

“Confusion of birds that have become strangers,” read lines from Rabearivelo’s poem XIII, “They cannot recognize their nest / they strike their bright wings / against sombre rock . . .” This exhibition is about a continent reclaiming itself, its soul and its bright wings.

Organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it opened in 2022, “Africa Fashion” has been adapted for the Brooklyn Museum by Ernestine White-Mifetu, the museum’s Sills Foundation curator of African art, and Annissa Malvoisin, Bard Graduate Center/Brooklyn Museum postdoctoral fellow in the arts of Africa, who have supplemented it with works from the museum’s holdings. The show they’ve created travels one path, which keeps the story moving, and they’ve taken care to place important information just before it is needed. With over 300 objects on view—textiles, fashion, jewelry, art, photography, video and film—one could feel overwhelmed. And yet the pace is easygoing and well punctuated with treats along the way, such as a colorful corner, painted like a mosque, that holds an eye-popping photograph and video by the Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj.

At pains to make sure viewers understand that Africa is not a monolith but a quilt of sovereign states, a wall in the next corridor is painted with the 54 nation flags of Africa—a Pan-African color wheel in green, yellow, red and black—with the design of each flag explained in a caption. Here we are also introduced to the politics and poetics of cloth. “As African nations achieved independence,” the wall text says, “commemorative cloths with images of political leaders, as well as messages of protest and celebration, were rapidly produced.”

Africa has a deep history of textile production: linen and wool, dyed and printed cotton, woven raffia. In the next room we meet these wondrous works—among them the ancient strip-woven cloths known as kente and aso-òkè, vibrant abstractions that have hidden meanings and a West African identity. The interlaced color blocks in “Another Time,” a 2011 painting by Atta Kwami, take inspiration from the kente cloth of Ghana and nod to the Sankofa philosophy of Ghana’s Akan tribe: “It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.” The room also contains tie-dyed and resist-dyed cottons; marriage blankets, which mark life events with additional adornment; and refined raffia panels made by Kuba artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, their tessellated patterns like labyrinthine mind games.

From here, fashion takes flight. Vitrines arranged in a zigzag path (the mod wallpaper in the room sets the era) introduce pioneering African designers of the midcentury: Kofi Ansah, from Ghana; Naïma Bennis, from Morocco; Alphadi, of Mauritanian heritage; Chris Seydou, from Mali; and the Nigerian designer Shade Thomas-Fahm. Many of these garments are fascinating mashups of African and Western silhouettes, fabrics and embellishment. This was decades before the English couturier John Galliano did the same thing in his Spring-Summer 1997 “Maasai” collection for Christian Dior.

As the garments move to the present day, we see historicity and the handmade meeting modernity. Two men’s ensembles from Lukhanyo Mdingi’s “Perennial” collection (Autumn-Winter 2020), a mix of jackets and joggers in felted kid mohair and merino wool, ivory and cognac, are stunning rustic luxe. Each includes a long sheath slit up the sides—a chieftain’s vibe—and yet they’re beautifully androgynous. In the large last room of the show, where contemporary pieces are divided into the sections “Artisanal,” “Mixologist,” and “Afrotopia,” it’s an explosion of bright wings. Along with their spiritual and cultural intonations, these dresses and ensembles take up new concerns: rights for black women and the LGBTQ community; sustainability and the environment.

Fashion is addressed through photographs as well, and perhaps the most compelling section of the show is in the middle, where photography dominates. Personal snapshots from individuals with history in Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, Togo and more take us back to an intergenerational place. The images are profound. These lead to professional photography from the 1960s and ’70s, which is juxtaposed with work, on the opposite wall, from the 21st century. Reaching from the midcentury Ghanaian James Barnor (now 94 years old), who opened one of the first color-processing labs in Africa, to the ascendant nonbinary South African Zanele Muholi,

—Ms. Jacobs is the Arts Intel Report editor for the weekly newsletter Air Mail.