The C-MAP Africa program at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) examined artistic practices across Africa between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. It explored how the decline of postcolonial utopias, the rise of authoritarian politics, economic restructuring, and the adoption of neoliberal policies transformed artistic production across the continent. During this period, many artists moved away from decolonizing aesthetics and state-sanctioned artistic canons, developing new forms of practice while establishing independent structures for learning, collaboration, and circulation beyond official institutions.

The program was organized around four thematic modules:

1. Is There Such a Thing as Conceptual Art in Africa? (April–July 2024)
2. Independent Art Networks (September 2024–February 2025)
3. Art and Activism (March–November 2025)
4. International and Global Art Networks (February–May 2026)

In addition to the seminar program, the C-MAP Africa research group undertook two research trips, to Nairobi in 2025 and Morocco in 2026, as part of its broader research agenda.

Module 1 — Is There Such a Thing as Conceptual Art in Africa?

This module focused on case studies that explore different paradigms of conceptualism in Africa, echoing questions raised by Okwui Enwezor in his essay for the Queens Museum of Art's 1999 exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, on whether conceptual art in Africa is a genuine practice or a term imported as part of a neocolonial enterprise of modernist art history.

• Laboratoire Agit'art, Senegal — Clémentine Deliss (April 5, 2024)
• The School of Sign and Aouchem: Algerian Modernism between Utopia and Agency — Lydia Haddag (May 9, 2024)
• Focus Algeria: Hamid Zenati — Anna Schneider in conversation with Salma Tuqan (June 6, 2024)
• Students from the African Continent at the Art Academies and the Film School in Poland — Przemysław Strożek (July 11, 2024)

Module 2 — Independent Art Networks

In the 1980s, as many African countries underwent structural re-adjustments, there was a decrease in public spending on artistic education and culture. As a result, many artists began organizing independent networks through workshops, festivals, and exhibitions. This module examined some of the most impactful independent art initiatives operating during the studied time period, conducted with living artists and cultural producers who were either participants or initiators of those endeavors.

• The Asilah Cultural Moussem-Festival: Tricontinental Meeting Points — Toni Maraini in conversation with Morad Montazami (September 19, 2024)
• Triangle Network in South Africa: Thupelo Workshop and Bag Factory — Sam Nhlengethwa and Jill Trappler (October 10, 2024)
• Triangle Network Zimbabwe, Pachipamwe (1988) — Berry Bickle (November 14, 2024)
• doual'art: Center for Contemporary Art and Laboratory of Urban Transformation in Douala, Cameroon — Iolanda Pensa (December 12, 2024)

Module 3 — Art and Activism

This module looked at artistic groups that approached art and culture as tools of struggle and whose practice offered commentaries and critiques of regimes and power structures in their respective contexts.

• "Art-to-the People": A Conversation with Etale Sukuro on the Sisi kwa Sisi Collective — Etale Sukuro in conversation with Donald Kuira Maingui (March 13, 2025)
• Freed from Representation: Light as Activism in Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen — Delinda Collier (April 16, 2025)
• Annouchka de Andrade: On Preserving the Legacy of Sarah Maldoror (May 1, 2025)
• Kamĩrĩĩthũ Afterlives — Kenny Cupers (May 12, 2025)
• The Harvest of Evelyn Ashamallah — Mariam Elnozahy (June 5, 2025)
• Paris Noir: Artistic Circulations and Anti-Colonial Resistance, 1950–2000 — Alicia Knock (July 10, 2025)
• The Aka Circle of Artists and Group Dynamics in Contemporary African Art — Iheanyi Onwuegbucha (September 3, 2025)
• Denis Martinez's 7 murs revisités, 1989: The Politics of Indigeneity in 1980s Algeria — Cynthia Becker (October 2, 2025)
• Martin Abasi Phiri's (1957–1997) Art and Activism: Elements in His Legacy — Andrew Mulenga (November 13, 2025)

Module 4 — International and Global Art Networks

This module examined critical exhibitions in which African artists participated that reflected the last impulses of the decolonial era's internationalist ethos, also taking other exhibitions as case studies central to African artists' engagement and integration into global art circuits at the beginning of the 1990s.

• Sites of Resistance and Solidarity: The Arab Biennale Reconsidered — Nada Shabout (February 26, 2026)
• TRICONTINENTAL. Africa in the Havana Biennale. 1980s–1990s — Miguel Rojas-Sotelo (March 26, 2026)
• Looking Back to Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African Art (1991) — Susan Mullin Vogel (May 5, 2026)

Capsule Sessions

• Audiovisual Archives of the Senegalese Cinema Department (DCI) — Tiziana Manfredi and Marco Lena (February 20, 2025)
  
• Our Modern: Primary Documents of the Art of the African World — Smooth Nzewi and Nancy Dantas (December 11, 2025)
• Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa — Martino Stierli, Ikem Stanley Okoye, and Mallory Cohen (January 29, 2026)

The C-MAP Africa research program was conceived and organized by Beya Othmani (C-MAP Africa Fellow 2024-26) and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi (The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and leader of the C-MAP Africa Group) 

C-MAP Session “Denis Martinez's 7 murs revisités, 1989: The Politics of Indigeneity in 1980s Algeria” with Cynthia Becker (October 2, 2025). The Museum of Modern Art