The Shape of Things to Come is a forward-looking exhibition that brings together a diverse group of internationally acclaimed artists whose practices illuminate the complexities of a rapidly changing world. At its core, the exhibition reflects on how art not only responds to transformation but also anticipates and shapes it. Through bold palettes, inventive textures, and unconventional materials, these artists stretch the limits of painting, sculpture, and photography, demonstrating the resilience and adaptability of art to mirror and intervene in contemporary life. The works on view form a dialogue that registers today’s turbulence and shifting cultural narratives while affirming art’s enduring capacity to inspire reflection, resistance, and renewal. Collectively, they highlight art’s dual role as witness and catalyst, offering visual interventions that prompt us to reimagine the future. 

The exhibition's title emerges from a fundamental belief in human agency, the conviction that we actively shape our future rather than passively await predetermined outcomes. This perspective serves as a direct counterpoint to fatalistic thinking, asserting instead that tomorrow is sculpted through our conscious decisions and deliberate actions taken today. Within the realm of visual art, this philosophy finds profound expression in the creative process itself. Every artwork represented in this exhibition began as an idea, a vision that existed only in the artist's imagination, before being transformed into tangible reality. El Anatsui's bottle-cap tapestries, Iman Issa's sculptural investigations, Abdoulaye Konaté's textile compositions, Adam Pendleton's textual abstractions,  
 
Carrie Mae Weems' photographic narratives all exemplify this journey from concept to creation, demonstrating how artists literally give form to the future through their practice. These six internationally acclaimed practitioners don't merely document change, they actively participate in shaping it, using their creative voices to challenge existing narratives, propose new possibilities, and inspire viewers to reimagine what lies ahead.  

Among the featured artists, El Anatsui stands as one of Africa’s most celebrated contemporary voices. Renowned for his shimmering metallic wall sculptures composed of recycled materials such as liquor bottle caps, printing plates, and cassava graters, Anatsui transforms humble, discarded objects into vast, tapestry-like works. His constructions embody themes of cultural heritage, environmental sustainability, and global interconnectedness. By reworking fragments into dazzling forms, he invites viewers to consider the layered histories embedded in everyday materials, while celebrating craft traditions that span generations. Within this exhibition, his works meditate on transformation - both of matter and meaning - demonstrating how fragments of the past can be reassembled into new cultural narratives that transcend borders. 

Bringing a distinct conceptual sensibility, Iman Issa explores how history, memory, and language intertwine. Known for her Heritage Studies series, Issa reimagines historical artifacts as abstract, minimal forms paired with interpretive texts. Using museological tools such as vitrines, plinths, and precise captions, she destabilizes the authority of historical objects by stripping them of specific temporal and geographic origins. The resulting works underscore the mutable nature of heritage, questioning how narratives are constructed and redefined across time. Issa's contribution to the exhibition provides a nuanced commentary on the shifting frameworks of cultural interpretation, asking what survives from the past and how those remnants are reshaped in the present. 

Expedition of Punt, 2017, continues Issa's exploration of historical reinterpretation through minimal abstraction. Like other works in the series, it transforms ancient artifacts into a geometrically abstract sculpture, challenging conventional museum presentation. The accompanying didactic text references historical sources while the physical object operates at the junction between contemporary form and historical context, creating alternative iconographies that question official narratives. 

Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté offers monumental textile-based installations crafted from woven and dyed fabrics native to his homeland. Deeply rooted in West African traditions where textiles function as carriers of communication, Konaté blends abstraction and figuration to address social, political, and environmental issues. His use of color and form conjures both fragility and resilience, grounding urgent global concerns in a local language of fabric and dye. In Konaté’s Resistance, 2025, the tactile richness of textiles becomes a site for collective storytelling, an aesthetic that is simultaneously rooted in Mali’s cultural memory and universally resonant in its call for renewal and justice.  

The exhibition also features Adam Pendleton, a contemporary American artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, collage, video, performance, and installation. Central to his work is the concept of Black Dada, a term he coined to describe a visual and cultural language that merges the radical experimentation of the Dada movement with the politics of Black representation. Pendleton's text-based paintings and large-scale wall works often combine language, images, and abstraction, creating a dynamic interplay between legibility and obscurity. This approach is exemplified in two 2024 paintings: Black Dada (D) and Untitled (WE ARE NOT), both executed with silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas.  

Through his innovative practice, Pendleton expands conversations about race, abstraction, and cultural production, cementing his position as a defining voice in contemporary art. Black Dada (D) features a single, clearly printed letter "D" that contrasts against hand-painted forms, while Untitled (WE ARE NOT) incorporates language from Pendleton's Black Dada manifesto: "we are not naïve / we are successive / we are not exclusive." The latter work explores themes of cultural resistance, identity, and conceptual abstraction through fragmented text and gestural mark-making that challenges the boundary between painting and language.  

British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE  is celebrated for incisive explorations of colonialism, post-colonialism, and globalization. Working across sculpture, painting, photography, and installation, Shonibare interrogates race, class, and culture through works that merge political critique with playful references to Western art history and literature. His  Hybrid Mask (Bamana N Ntomo), 2023 and Hybrid Mask (Koré) II, 2023, crafted from wood, acrylic paint, and brass, draws simultaneously from West African and European traditions. In collapsing these cultural boundaries, the work underscores how identity is continuously reconstructed in a globalized world. Within this exhibition, Shonibare challenges viewers to reconsider the ways historical narratives are told and retold.  

Finally, Carrie Mae Weems, one of the most influential American artists of her generation, contributes works from her 1993 Africa series. In these intimate black-and-white photographs of architectural structures in Ghana, Senegal, and Mali, Weems examines how gender and power are encoded in built environments while documenting the enduring legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. The series, which includes works such as Stairways to Heaven, 1993, and A Place for Him, A Place for Her, 1993, examines the complex relationship between African Americans and Africa, and questions romanticized notions while seeking authentic cultural connections and deeper understanding of heritage. Known for incorporating storytelling and folklore to confront histories of erasure, she demonstrates here how physical spaces can embody both dominance and resistance.  

Together, these artists traverse media, geographies, and histories, yet their practices converge in a shared insistence on art’s philosophical and emotional potential. Through abstraction and figuration alike, they use form, color, and material to unlock deeper truths and foster personal resonance. By cultivating both introspection and connection, The Shape of Things to Come  affirms art’s enduring relevance and its power to shape cultural and social narratives. In an era of profound uncertainty, the exhibition challenges viewers to reflect on the present while imagining the possibilities of what lies ahead. 

 - Dexter Wimberly