Pan-Africanism is one of the 20th century's most consequential political and philosophical movements — a broad, contested, evolving current of anti-colonial resistance and transnational solidarity amongst peoples of African descent. Its intellectual lineage runs from W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey through Kwame Nkrumah, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon.

Project a Black Planet, opening at the Barbican Centre on June 11, is the first major exhibition to consider both its influence on visual art and culture, and the critical role of artists in shaping Pan-African visions from the 1920s to the present. In doing so, it ties the Pan-African term to the broader liberation movements that emerged from and responded to the conditions of Black existence across geographies and eras. It spans over 300 works — paintings, installations, posters, journals, and film — produced across Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, North America, and Western Europe.

Among the 44 participating artists: El Anatsui, Wifredo Lam, Simone Leigh, Lubaina Himid, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, David Hammons, William Kentridge, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Samuel Fosso, and Claudette Johnson.

The exhibition makes visible what has long been underrecognized: alongside the manifestos, artists were sustaining, expanding, and giving form to Pan-Africanism — collectively imagining what a Black world might look like, feel like, and mean, outside of the colonial frameworks that had defined representation for centuries. Not as illustrators of a political project, but as its most persistent imagineers.

The institutional stakes of this exhibition are significant. Project a Black Planet is co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barbican Centre, and KANAL-Centre Pompidou Brussels — four major institutions across three countries, centering Pan-African art history. That coordinated institutional commitment is itself a statement. It signals that the art historical reckoning with Pan-Africanism's visual dimension is not a niche scholarly interest but a mainstream institutional priority, one whose time, evidently, has come — long overdue.