This Week in Black Art and Culture (June 14th – 20th, 2026)

Above: President Barak Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama | 2017 | Truman Balcony | Photo by Pete Souza, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What does it mean to leave something behind?

This week, that question quietly weaves its way through art, literature, and culture in unexpected ways. Across continents, artists, writers, and institutions are confronting the delicate task of preserving not just objects or achievements, but ideas, communities, and ways of seeing the world.

Some are building physical spaces that invite future generations to gather, learn, and imagine. Others are ensuring that decades of artistic practice remain accessible long after their creators are gone. Elsewhere, stories continue to travel across languages and borders, finding new audiences far from where they began.

There is also a sense that memory itself is being reimagined. It can be held in buildings, embedded in discarded materials, passed down through books, or sustained through the communities one nurtures over a lifetime.

Perhaps that is what this week’s stories ultimately reveal: legacy is rarely about permanence. It is about movement. It is the quiet, continuous act of passing something meaningful from one set of hands to another.

As always, we invite you to slow down and journey through this week’s stories from across African art and culture.

The Obama Presidential Center Opens Its Doors

After nearly a decade of planning, the Obama Presidential Center opened this week in Chicago, but this is not a presidential library in the traditional sense. It is an ambitious experiment in what legacy-making can look like in the twenty-first century.

Spread across more than 19 acres on Chicago’s South Side, the campus is conceived less as a monument to a former president and more as a civic ecosystem. Alongside a museum chronicling life inside the Obama White House are a public library branch, a women’s garden honoring female leaders, an NBA-sized basketball court, wetlands, community gardens, playgrounds and spaces designed for public gathering and media production.

Its dedication day, designed as an invite-only event, took place on Thursday, June 18, 2026, with a star-studded dedication ceremony featuring artists, musicians and global leaders, underscoring the Center’s core message: hope is not an abstract political slogan but a collective practice.

Notably, the Center will not house Barack Obama’s presidential archives, which remain under the care of the National Archives. Instead, it offers something else entirely, a proposition that memory itself can become a public resource.

Next week, we will spotlight some of the artists whose works shape this new cultural landmark, including Carrie Mae Weems, Hugo McCloud, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.

Frank Bowling’s Legacy Becomes a Foundation for Future Artists

How does an artist ensure their work remains alive long after the final brushstroke?

For Sir Frank Bowling, the answer arrives in the form of a foundation dedicated not simply to preservation, but to possibility.

Launching officially on June 24, the Frank Bowling Foundation will expand access to art education while safeguarding the legacy of one of Britain’s most influential painters. Established as a registered charity in 2024, the foundation has already received a substantial gift from the artist, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper and a vast archive documenting his transatlantic career across Guyana, Britain and the United States.

Education sits at the heart of its mission. Its inaugural public program, Frank Bowling: Driven to Draw, opening at the Royal Drawing School on June 25, offers an intimate look into the artist’s lifelong relationship with drawing.

Yet the foundation also formalizes decades of Bowling’s philanthropic commitments—from scholarships and bursaries to support for galleries and the provision of art supplies to state schools across the United Kingdom.

At a time when arts education continues to face uncertainty worldwide, the foundation advances a simple but urgent proposition: creativity is not a luxury, but an essential tool for learning, curiosity and independent thought.

Kim Dacres Turns Reclaimed Rubber into a Language of Resistance

What can discarded materials tell us about the world we live in?  For New York-based artist Kim Dacres, quite a lot.

In her current solo exhibition, Lost on a Two-Way Street, Dacres transforms reclaimed tires, bicycle parts and rubber into sculptures that speak to some of the most pressing concerns of contemporary life, from attacks on LGBTQ+ rights and environmental crises to the emotional toll of living through social and political uncertainty. The exhibition is currently on view at the Charles Moffett gallery in Tribeca, New York, and runs until June 20. 

An expansion of her earlier body of work, Crossroads Like This (2025), the exhibition features busts, medallions, and wall-based sculptures that continue Dacres’s exploration of resilience, community, and collective memory. Drawing from her experiences as a first-generation American of Jamaican descent, she repurposes everyday materials into monuments that honor Black and Brown communities while questioning whose stories are preserved and whose are overlooked. 

Music also serves as an important thread throughout the exhibition, with references to artists such as Stevie Wonder and Patrice Rushen acting as emotional anchors for several works.

At its heart, Lost on a Two-Way Street reminds us that materials carry histories. In Dacres’s hands, rubber ceases to be debris and instead becomes a powerful archive of movement, survival, and the complicated realities of our time. 

Remembering Danny Simmons, the Architect Behind Several Artistic Communities

The art world has lost one of its great cultural builders.

Artist, poet and arts advocate Danny Simmons passed away at the age of 72, leaving behind a legacy that extends far beyond his own creative practice.

Though widely recognized as the older brother of Russell Simmons and Joseph “Run” Simmons of Run-DMC, Danny Simmons carved out a distinct path as a champion of Black artists and artistic communities. Through the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation and, later, Rush Arts Philadelphia, he created spaces where emerging artists could be seen, supported, and nurtured.

His influence stretched across poetry, visual art, publishing, and television, helping to bring poetic spoken word into mainstream consciousness through HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.

A collector, curator, and painter, Simmons understood that institutions are often built through relationships rather than buildings alone. Artists, museums, and communities across Philadelphia and New York benefited from his generosity and unwavering belief in Black cultural production.

His passing serves as a reminder that some of the most consequential figures in the arts are not always those at the center of attention, but those quietly constructing platforms upon which others can stand.

His absence will be deeply felt, but the communities he built will continue to speak on his behalf.

Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s Blessings Finds New Life Among Dutch Youth Readers

African literature continues to travel in unexpected and meaningful ways, and we are here for it.

Zegeningen, the Dutch translation of Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s debut novel Blessings, has been nominated for the Netherlands’ Best Book for Young Adults 2026, an annual prize judged entirely by readers aged fifteen to eighteen.

The nomination is particularly striking because Blessings was originally published as an adult novel. Yet its exploration of identity, family, desire and survival has clearly resonated across generations and geographies.

Set in mid-2000s Nigeria, the novel follows Obiefuna, a young boy whose life is irrevocably altered after his father discovers him in an intimate moment with another boy. What unfolds is a deeply moving portrait of selfhood shaped under the pressures of repression and social expectation.

There is something quietly significant about Dutch teenagers selecting a Nigerian queer narrative as worthy of celebration. It suggests that stories rooted in specific local realities can simultaneously speak a universal language.

In an increasingly fragmented world, literature continues to do what borders often cannot: create intimacy between strangers.

Cameroonian Writer Makuchi Returns with a New Collection of Stories

Cameroonian writer Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, known simply as Makuchi, belongs firmly to the latter category.

This summer, Spears Books will publish Woman of the Lake, her latest short story collection, introducing readers to a body of work already notably acclaimed. The title story was previously nominated for the Pushcart Prize, while another story from the collection received recognition from the African Literature Association.

Scholar, educator, and former president of the African Literature Association, Makuchi has long occupied a significant place within African literary circles. Her work consistently navigates the intersections of memory, migration, folklore, and contemporary life.

That this new collection arrives after decades of scholarship and storytelling feels particularly significant. It is a reminder that literary careers are rarely linear and that some of the most rewarding voices emerge through years of patient cultivation.

For readers interested in African short fiction, Woman of the Lake may well become one of the season’s most anticipated releases.

Compiled by Roli O’tsemaye

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