After acclaimed runs at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, Africa Fashion traveled to the Portland Art Museum. The exhibition features photographs by Algerian photographer Lazhar Manssouri taken in a portrait studio in the second half of the 20th century.
"Africa Fashion employs a cross-cultural and cross-continental approach throughout the exhibition galleries, centering multiple and varied African voices and perspectives. Starting with the African independence and the liberation years that sparked a radical political and social reordering across the continent, the exhibition explores how fashion, alongside music and the visual arts, formed a key part of Africa’s cultural renaissance, laying the foundation for today’s fashion revolution. A section on textiles presents vintage woven kente cloth alongside printed kanga cloths and Dutch Wax cottons, showing how the making and wearing of traditional textiles in the moment of independence became a strategic political act."
Africa Fashion was on view at the Portland Art Museum November 18, 2023 – February 18, 2024.
Exhibition organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Curated by the V&A’s Christine Checinska, Ph.D., Senior Curator of African and Diaspora Textiles and Fashion, with Project Curator Elisabeth Murray. Curated for Portland by Julia Dolan, Ph.D., The Portland Art Museum’s Minor White Senior Curator of Photography.
