This major exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, « Paris noir, 1950-2000 » (Black Paris, 1950–2000), features 150 African, African-American, and Caribbean artists—on view until 30 June. Around 400 paintings, sculptures, and archival documents trace their presence in Paris from 1947 (the year the magazine Présence Africaine, the pan-African culture magazine, was founded) through the 1990s, a period marked by the fall of apartheid and the publication of Revue Noire. Subtitled Artistic Circulations and Anti-Colonial Struggles, 1950–2000, the exhibition honors those who were forgotten, ignored, or marginalized. Many artists found refuge in Paris or received their training there, including Ethiopian modernist Skunder Boghossian. Skunder studied at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and later at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Skunder arrived in Paris in 1957, where he studied African art under the guidance of Madeleine Rousseau, a noted ethnologist at the Musée de l’Homme. Rousseau played a key role in promoting non-Western art and fostering cross-cultural artistic exchanges, as highlighted in the exhibition. During this formative period, Boghossian became involved in the Pan-African cultural movement centered around Présence Africaine, the influential intellectual journal and publishing house led by figures such as Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Alioune Diop. In Paris, he connected with fellow African artists and thinkers, including South African painter Gerard Sekoto, who shared his commitment to decolonizing artistic expression. These interactions deeply shaped Boghossian’s artistic vision, encouraging his fusion of Ethiopian iconography, African symbolism, and European modernist techniques into a uniquely diasporic visual language.

As Elizabeth W. Giorgis wrote in “Modernist Art in Ethiopia,” Skunder’s education in jazz and his love for this style of music also took root in Paris, where the best of African American jazz musicians had flocked. “He knew all of the famed musicians, including Bud Powell, Lester Young, and Sonny Rollins, as well as all of the visual and aural particulars of the Paris jazz world. ”

Art historian Elizabeth Harney highlighted the significance of Skunder’s time in Paris by quoting his reflections. He told her: “At the time, Paris was a cultural, a place where cultures interested. It was a part of one’s normal growth to go there to get caught in these currents , and they would in turn bring you to other currents and so on. One could make out a definition for oneself , the world and the universe right there in Paris.“

Skunder’s arrival in Paris coincided with the city’s role in the 1950s as a crossroads of avant-garde movements—a place of transit, convergence, and departure for emancipatory struggles, especially among Africans from colonized nations and Caribbeans. While colonial-era African exhibitions were still being held in the capital, an insurrectionary counterculture was beginning to take shape.

Another artist featured in the exhibition is the Haitian painter Roland Dorcély (1930–2017), who, among others, studied under Fernand Léger. In 1951, he received a scholarship from the French government and moved to Paris, where he attended the École des Arts et Métiers and studied with both Léger and André Masson. During this period, Dorcély collaborated with fellow Haitian artists Max Pinchinat, Luckner Lazard, and Luce Turnier. In 1953, he married Nicole Turnier—also a painter and the sister of Luce—with whom he had three children. Through his friendship with Michel Leiris and his wife Louise, Dorcély was introduced to the vibrant Parisian artistic and intellectual circles of the time. He returned to Haiti in 1954.

The Martinican artist Georges Coran (1928–2017) revisited the iconic millefleurs tapestries of the Middle Ages, infusing them with the poetry of Aimé Césaire and lush tropical imagery. Senegalese painter Iba N’Diaye (1928–2008), an admirer of Velázquez, redefined portraiture through his strikingly original depictions of Christ. Luce Turnier (1924–1994), one of the first Haitian female painters, arrived in Paris in 1951, studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and painted her Cabane de chantier. Alongside these long-overlooked artists now brought to light, the exhibition also highlights renowned figures such as the Afro-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (1902–1982), who was introduced to the Parisian art scene by Picasso. A close associate of André Breton and inspired by Aimé Césaire, Lam developed an Afro-Atlantic surrealism of resistance, aiming to “disrupt the dreams of the exploiters.” Totems by another Cuban artist, Agustín Cárdenas (1927–2001), are placed throughout the exhibition, rhythmically punctuating the space.

With Black Paris, a long-standing gap in French institutional recognition is finally addressed. Research on these artists has largely taken place in foreign universities, supported by publications and acquisition programs abroad. Yet Paris—this revolutionary, intersectional crossroads of emancipatory struggles—was undeniably the site of the Tout-Monde cherished by Édouard Glissant. Arriving from Martinique in 1946, Glissant worked at The UNESCO Courier, as René Depestre had before him.

In 1948, South African artist Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002), a member of the CoBrA movement, welcomed his compatriot Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993) to Paris. Sekoto arrived in the city at the age of 34, bringing with him a collection of work depicting scenes of everyday life in the townships of Pretoria. The South African’s self-portrait, now featured as the poster for the exhibition, depicts a man with a tan complexion illuminated by the tawny, coppery light of early evening. With almond-shaped eyes and slightly raised eyebrows, his expression invites attention, subtly drawing the viewer in. Sekoto, who had few exhibitions in Paris, made a living by playing piano and singing in jazz clubs. In the 1970s, he began a series titled Blue Head, which includes These Senegalese Women (1979), where the figures’ silhouettes are crossed by bluish rays of light, rendered with a thin, wavering brushstroke—vague and watery.

The exhibition is full of striking discoveries. Next to a work by Hervé Télémaque (1937–2022), the Haitian-born painter who worked from his studio in Villejuif, close to Paris, we encounter Franco-Senegalese artist Diagne Chanel (b. 1953), trained in Art Deco. From Paris, West Indian artists such as Frantz Absalon (b. 1948) and Alex Burke (b. 1944) present abstract works aimed at cultural disalienation.

Political protest movements are well documented. The presence in the capital of major writers—Césaire, Glissant, Depestre, Maryse Condé, and Frantz Fanon, on the Francophone side—is duly acknowledged, as is that of Miriam Makeba, Archie Shepp, and pioneering filmmakers like Ousmane Sembène and Sarah Maldoror (1919–2020). A trailblazer of pan-African cinema, Maldoror was born in the Gers, southwestern France, to a French mother and Guadeloupean father. Orphaned at a young age, she found a chosen family through the Présence Africaine bookstore. She gave herself a new name, Maldoror—taken from Comte de Lautréamont’s poetic 1868 novel—boldly proclaiming: “I thumb my nose at those slaveholders who, for years, for centuries, named their human merchandise.” With her company, the Griots, she staged Genet’s Les Nègres.

James Baldwin is seen walking through Paris with his friend Beauford Delaney, whom he brought from the United States. Tennessee-born Delaney, an Abstract Expressionist before the term existed and a spiritual heir to Van Gogh, recognized what he owed to Paris: “The light inscrutable, eternal, serene, wordless, yet sovereign, moving yet still including all things, silencing all things.” Baldwin recalled, “I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, ‘Look again,’ which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.”

This 1955 portrayal of Baldwin is one of several Delaney created. It illustrates how, in numerous respects, the two were kindred souls—both African American, gay artists navigating a society marked by racism and homophobia. In this depiction, the closeness between them is unmistakable.

Delaney lived in poverty and battled mental illness for much of his life, spending his final years at St. Anne’s Hospital for the Insane, where he died in 1975.