Do African artists actually need to be curated differently?

Impressions of Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York City

Imagine a retrospective exhibition—the most expansive North American retrospective to date—of a photographer such as Irving Penn or Walker Evans. Alongside their 200+ photographs, the show would include a room filled with American quilts, twentieth-century Utah wedding dresses, Navajo silverwork, and cowboy hats. In the main galleries, where the photographs hang, Quechua textiles from the Andes would descend from the ceiling alongside bolts of denim in assorted washes. Music would drift through the space: Elvis Presley, Justin Bieber, the Buena Vista Social Club. The photographs themselves would be displayed with elegance, against walls painted a tasteful muted blue.

Instead of focusing on Walker Evans’s artistic practice, the wall labels would adopt a persistent anthropological tone, making big claims about “American culture” based on the ruffled edge of a shirt collar or the placement of jewelry. Interpretation would slide into projection; observation into assumption.

This exhibition would be so conceptually muddled, at times, purporting to center the photographer; at others, the subjects depicted. It would oscillate between reading the images as anthropological documents to interpret the culture of the United States and trying to define Americans—an abstract, hemispheric category in this show. Now transpose this imaginary exhibition. Replace America with Mali or West Africa. This, in essence, is Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum.

Seydou Keïta (1921–2001) is a central figure in the history of studio photography in West Africa. With nearly 275 works on view, the exhibition offers a substantial survey of his artistic achievement. My review is less concerned with the photographs themselves than with what surrounds them: the abundance of wall texts, the unidentified textiles suspended overhead, the exhibition soundtrack, and the final room, “Fashioning a New Nation,” devoted to West African fashion and jewelry—elements that several publications have mistakenly presented as Keïta’s personal artifacts (for example here, and here too).

This confusion is not entirely surprising. Why include a sartorial display in a retrospective if the artist has no direct relationship to the objects on view? There is a clear effort to situate Keïta within a broader cultural atmosphere, one perceived as colorful, buoyant, and musical. The impulse is understandable. It seeks to evoke context, animate the photographs, and translate a sensory world. Yet in doing so, the exhibition risks establishing a differential standard. Artists working within the same institutional framework are not afforded the same focus.

The West African artist becomes a site of imprecision, and too often an entry point for the study of an “other” culture. The exhibition also conveys a more troubling suggestion. It seems to imply that 275+ photographs are not sufficient, that the work of Seydou Keïta cannot stand on its own within the conventions of the white cube. Even if unintended, this is a difficult premise to accept.

The curator, Catherine McKinley, explained in an interview that “materiality is a very important facet of the show, with the last room being dedicated to examples of textiles like those featured in his work.” It is that small word, “like,” that gives pause. A comparable degree of approximation would be unlikely in an exhibition devoted to a canonical American photographer. At stake here is the recognition that the curatorial framework is not neutral. It is shaped, at least in part, by the artist’s origin.

This latest show at the Brooklyn Museum prompts a necessary question: Do African artists actually need to be curated differently? I do not pretend to have a definitive answer. It is possible, indeed necessary, to foreground materiality and context without relinquishing rigor. But when approximation replaces precision, it risks reinscribing a familiar and troubling narrative: that artists from the African continent are deemed less worthy of intellectual rigor, based on the assumption that their culture prioritizes the sensory or the bodily over the intellectual. This is a precarious path, one that edges uncomfortably close to outdated and reductive notions of the “primitive” or “naïve” African artist.

This tendency is compounded by the density and tone of the wall texts. Context is essential for engaging with Keïta’s work, both historically and socially. Audiences benefit from understanding how these photographs were produced and circulated. Yet the interpretive framework often leans toward an anthropological register. The photographs are treated as documents through which to reconstruct the lives of the sitters, rather than as autonomous works of art. Too often, the viewer is guided to look at the subjects in the photographs rather than at the photographs themselves. The exhibition begins to feel like a proxy for a broader survey of twentieth-century West African culture, with that narrative overshadowing Keïta’s work.

One might justify this approach by arguing that American audiences require contextualization when encountering art from Africa. Yet the extent and nature of this contextualization matter. The addition of interpretive layers that verge on anthropological observations creates the impression that artworks from the African continent must continually explain themselves and their cultures. This expectation is rarely applied with the same intensity to Western photographers. The logic of legibility shifts when the work originates outside the Western canon. The museum appears to insist on total comprehension.

Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum (on view through May 17, 2026)

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