Africa


Àkéte Art Foundation/ Lagos Biennial
$100,000
Lagos, Nigeria
2025

To support The Museum of Things Unseen, the Lagos Biennial’s fifth edition in fall 2026, which offers a platform for contemporary art in the city. The Biennial fosters the production, critical reception, and dialogue on contemporary art in Africa and explores contested histories through site-specific installations. The 2026 Biennial seeks to recontextualize rarely or never seen works, including a selection by US and Indigenous artists, through artistic interventions and critical dialogues. The creation of this speculative museum space in Lagos opens questions on art’s visibility and affords new interpretive frameworks for the works presented. It also brings them in dialogue with African and global audiences and deepens the conversation around their socio-political significance while advancing critical reflections on museum-making.

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
$250,000
Cape Town, South Africa
2025

To support exhibitions of the work of Cauleen Smith in 2025 and Kambui Olujimi in 2026, marking the first museum surveys of their practices on the African continent. Both presentations delve into shared narratives of Black life, resistance, and visions of liberatory possibilities. English-language catalogues accompany the exhibitions.

Kalakuta Trust
$100,000
Cape Town, South Africa
2024

To support Chimurenga’s research and archival project exploring Pan-African cultural projects on both sides of the Atlantic in the years following the creation of post-colonial African states. It focuses on the influence of Ousmane Sembene’s militant films on the development and theorization of the Black Independent Cinema movement in the U.S., particularly by the so-called LA Rebellion, which gathered at the UCLA Film School in the 1970s. PASS (Pan African Space Station), a roving research platform, part installation, part public convening, part broadcast performance, is traveling to partner organizations in Bamako, Dakar, Conakry, Abidjan, Ouagadougou, Chicago, and Paris, to produce new knowledge on Pan-African cinema and its historical connections to American art and U.S. practitioners prior to the release of an online research archive and print publication.

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
$75,000
Cape Town, South Africa
2024

This survey of Vietnamese American artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn brings together films, installations, and sculptures made in the last two decades. The exhibition explores transnational entanglements in the wake of colonialism. 

Àkéte Art Foundation
$150,000
Lagos, Nigeria
2023

To support the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial, dedicated to the theme of refuge, as well as the participation of US artists and speakers. Featuring an international cohort of artists in a multilayered exhibition mounted at Tafawa Balewa Square, the biennial reaches toward a reimagined future in which alternative forms of community and togetherness would flourish. Founded in 2017 by a group of artists, the Lagos Biennial facilitates the presentation, production, and critical reception of contemporary art through research and exhibitions, public programs, and an oral history training program for the rising generation (ages 17–22). It embraces innovative artistic approaches and aims to address current social and political issues, engage new audiences, and establish new modes of interaction.