Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.
Here is another outstanding example, from writer-director Yemi Bamiro, about the remarkable career of Kwame Brathwaite, a photographer, musician and African American activist who was a unique politico-aesthete. With his brother Elombe, he virtually invented the phrase Black Is Beautiful in the 1960s by photographing the Grandassa Models in Harlem: young African American women who became the sensational template for beauty, doing away with the usual cosmetic products and the usual white standard of femininity.