Tyler Mitchell, the thirty-year-old photography phenom, has enjoyed a rocket-fuelled rise in the fashion and art worlds since graduating from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts less than a decade ago. In 2018, he became the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vogue, capturing Beyonc é in a frilly white prairie dress with an elaborate headpiece that simultaneously recalled Giuseppe Arcimboldo's fantastical paintings, Frida Kahlo's elaborate flower crowns, and Carmen Miranda's fruit-basket hats.
Across eight galleries featuring ten artists, Echoes in the Present highlights how the cultural influences between Africa and Brazil have flowed both ways, a realisation Das first made growing up in Nigeria in the 1990s. "There were references to Brazilian culture through food, people's last names," she says. "I then later came into an understanding of enslaved people from Yorubaland who were forcibly removed and taken to Brazil, who then returned to Nigeria as freed slaves."
The Haines curation focuses on a series of large-scale paintings he began in 2023-marvelous small, never- and rarely-seen works from the 1990s and 2000s. Henderson's experimental 16mm films made in the 1970s and 80s (some restored by the Academy Film Archive) offer valuable insights into his character and wit, while delivering critical moments in Bay Area history and politically powerful content.