June - August 2026
The exhibition captures the extraordinary shimmer in the mundane - encouraging residents to really see their environment while giving visitors a visual map of Atlanta & NOLA’s souls beyond the tourist traps.
February - April 2026
This group exhibition is aKAZI's homage to the Senegalese concept of Teranga - which is a radical generosity that ensures no one is an "other," and everyone is welcome.
October - November 2025
This show is dedicated to the work of Mozambican sculptor, Gonçalo Mabunda, and it is hosted in collaboration with Emory University’s Michael C Carlos Museum’s Fall Exhibition Insistent Presence.
February-March 2025
In this exhibition, Christie Harwell illustrates and channels the grand tapestry of life, where perseverance becomes the backbone of the journey, regardless of the inevitable good, bad, and ugly moments that shape collective experiences. Her vibrant canvases tell of a very personal story that is also universal as Christie steps aside, becoming a medium and letting the works communicate, which they do powerfully.
January 2025
Rama is based in a beautiful space in the historic Senegalese city of St. Louis in the north of the country, at the border of Mauritania which sits on an island in the mouth of the Senegal river as it empties into the Atlantic. It is an ochre, orange and blue city full of history, grace, creativity, music and the ambiance of the very close by desert. Rama's creations incorporate all of her home and more. It was a thrill and an immense honor to host a show for Rama.
The power, resilience and history of indigo holds worlds past, very present and super futuristic. (this goes with the blue ensembles)
The desert nomadic vibe of Rama's home town of St. Louis, Senegal informs all of her collections and especially the ones cast in Mauritanian voile. Watching the models strut through the gallery and viscerally feeling how the fabric alternatively floats, whips and enfolds - transports us to those sandy ochre dunes surrounding St. Louis. (this goes with the orange, red, ochre patterned ensembles)
December 2024
It is always an absolute treat to host Nanseera at AKAZI. We so value the way she embodies our mission of showcasing excellence from the Continent in a multiplicity of ways. Each performance shows her search to finding her sweet spot getting ever closer and we are honored to watch it unfold. The journey in itself is already pure gold.
At aKAZI we love watching Nanseera move from genre to genre with such shapeshifting ease - even in one song. With a guitar and a knack for poignant lyrics, she explores societal injustice and the experiences of the in-between. The London-born performer grew up in Uganda and Ethiopia, moving to the United States for high school and college.
September 2024 - January 2025
Barkinado’s work often resembles an assembly of mosaics, each a part of something infinitely larger, and each oddly unsettling the other parts and yet they come together in a beautiful whole. The origin of this style of painting is simple in that initially he lacked the resources to purchase proper canvases and so he used simple A4 papers. As he filled each one, he simply added more and more of them, taping them together to create large figurative works. Later he realized that taping them together and off center seems to refract light and images in complex fractured portraits.Though each sheet has its own significance taken together they weave a whole albeit with multiple and distinctive perspectives. The gaze of his subjects is often weary and melancholy - almost as if their incredible beauty is too heavy a load to carry. It is this gaze that lends the added perspective of a peoples gazed upon - looking back at the world with a deep understanding that almost says: ‘you can’t even begin to understand me.’
As the website Urban Africans cites: “The different patches are symbolic of the idea that the ‘truth’ is made up of multiple perspectives. Barkinado explains: “Everyone has different emotions; you can be happy, angry, sad … all these emotions hide in one person. This is the same for objects. Everything has multiple perspectives. THAT is the truth. It’s not only the outside of a person that counts, that’s just one perspective. But there are elements to each of us which have not yet come out, because we have not lived through a certain situation that brings that part of us out. If you take all these elements together you get the real individual.” He looks at it just as a human body; all parts of the body are different, but each part has its own reason for being. He puts an equal amount of energy and power into every part he creates. He constructs and deconstructs to obtain the inequality of parts.”
April 28 - June 2024
‘ Les Traversées - Crossings’ encourages the viewer to enter Laye’s universe and to be carried away by the artist’s extraordinary and brilliant sensitivity in this collection of artworks. Through it, Laye Thioune crosses both the divide of the Atlantic Ocean from that city on the other side which seems to beckon to the American continent - in a form of reconnection, rediscovery and a renewed welcome while also passing back and forth in a renewed consciousness between his past, present and future.
February - March 2024
August - December 2023
A Different Kind of Blues is well known Senegalese artist Sadio Diallo’s newest body of work. It references the ascendancy of blues (as in color) in many of the works but more importantly it speaks to the continuum of ideas through diasporic spaces in liminal and real time like the music.
These paintings flit between dream worlds inhabited by mythical creatures in urban as well as natural settings to a child’s naive impression of their surroundings with everyday figures such as a king, a policeman, a soldier, or a musician anchoring the foreground, while the background swirls with the busyness of Dakar streets and mental images of global iconic marketing as well as deeply historical and spiritual symbols.The combination of the settings, the dreamscapes and the symbols all channel the artist’s lived experience as well as his current and future trajectories.
This exhibition is supported by Emory University’s Office of Culture, Community and Partner Engagement for the Michael C. Carlos Museum and Emory Libraries. We greatly value and appreciate their sponsorship as it enables aKAZI to bring Sadio’s work to Atlanta and host a number of enjoyable community events centered around the exhibition.
April - June 2023
In this body of work entitled Tradition & Transmission, specifically created for Atlanta, Audrey interrogates the tension between conserving culture and ensuring its evolution through fluid interaction with global influences. While centered on a contemporary backdrop, Audrey’s art also emerges very much from a place of nostalgia. It celebrates the ancient living cultures so evident in cities across the African Diaspora such as Dakar, Senegal. In just the same way a griot/storyteller interprets what is going on in the here and now while grounding it in history and tradition, Audrey’s work shouts loudly of a rich, complex and many-layered history holding its own within an absolutely ultra contemporary modernity.
September 10, 2022 - December 31, 2022
The realms of creativity in East Africa are dynamic and increasingly critical in all aspects of life in capitals such as Kampala and Kigali. As is happening all over the African Continent, with the advent of technology leveraging the platforms and profiles of young creatives, these East African artists and their many peers across the region, are thriving in spaces that are often challenging politically and historically. They are succeeding in spite of the limitations and this exhibition of their talent is a testament to their immense skill and talent.
March 26, 2022 - April 30, 2022
The paintings in Casimir's Mutliplicité portray multiple heritages, identities, and histories with depth and intentionality. They show joy and pain. Dreamlike and sometimes fractured - his portraits question seemingly everything. Casimir Bationo is an accomplished visual artist from Burkina Faso who has exhibited in many locations on the Continent, in France as well as here in the US. His work speaks to the mission of Francophonie Atlanta which is focused on 'presenting cultural events showcasing the richness and diversity of francophone cultures around the world' as well as aKAZI's - of breaking down the monolithic storytelling typical of the Continent.
January 30, 2022 - March 15, 2022
“The Power of Collaboration: Black Synergetic Voices" brings together talent from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Moçambique and Senegal, and also manifests once again the beautiful partnership between two galleries dedicated to Art from the African Continent in Atlanta: aKAZI and Gallery Miriam. The artists featured in this exhibition include Sadio Diallo, Erika Hibbert, Cheikh Tidiane Keita, Marvin K. Omede, Efe Okoran, Sambou Diouf, Douts Ndoye, Sandy Teepen, Jean Baptiste Djeka, Sençao Cossa, and Tinga.
December 5, 2021 - January 16, 2022
The portraiture in Mussiro & Other Masks arises from a rich mix of influences. Manuela Madeira, a social anthropologist turned visual artist, is from Moçambique. This country on the southeastern tip of the Continent is the home of many ancient kingdoms, centuries old trade routes with the Indian sub-continent and the far East, and the recipient of a truly Kafkaesque type of colonialism specialized in by the Portuguese. One of the last countries on the Continent to gain its independence in 1974, Moçambique was immediately plunged into a brutal twenty year civil war - actively fomented and financed by apartheid era South Africa next door. During those decades of war Moçambique turned to the then Eastern Block and followed an East German brand of Marxism.These are just some of the many layers, Manuela and her generation of Moçambicans born in the 1960s and early 1970s, navigated growing up. Manuela often references the many masks they all had to acquire to navigate the chasms these systems created, and there we have the scaffolding for Mussiro & Other Masks!
August 15, 2021 - November 15, 2021
Transient Permanence seeks to make visible both the fluidity of cultures and communities as well as the temporal nature of times and epochs in West Africa. Sadio Diallo comes from a bicultural lineage encompassing Mali and Senegal and one that manifests from the encounter between the sedentary and the nomadic cultures of the Fulani and Serere peoples of West Africa. Sadio's creations beckon the viewer into a treasure to search for the ancient and the modern and everything in between.
March 8, 2021 - April 12, 2021
We first came across Kiné Aw's work at the Village des Arts in Dakar. This community of artists was created by Senegal's first President, Leopold Senghor, who was a great supporter of the creative scene in the African Diaspora. It is still, today, a strong community of 50 working artists in their own individual studios. It is fitting that Kiné was part of this community for many years as her work is really rooted in the ever evolving ideas around the individual's role in the wider community and the push and pull of individual agency and communal growth.
December 18, 2020 - February 28, 2021
Cheikh Tidiane Keita's reflections on life in his home, Dakar, Senegal are a tactile reference to a way of life that is ancient, contemporary, and even in many ways futuristic. The strands that braid the whole are often bathed in the monochrome of the Sahel: beige, browns, and ochres. These then scaffold a foreground that erupts with violent and sudden color often infused by movement. Movements in dance, in traffic, in simple walking, and often parading an astounding elegance in midst of seeming chaos meld an incredible richness into a perfectly innovative and modern whole - that is uniquely and wholly Dakar.
Cheikh likes solitude to work. In this atmosphere of aloneness, his paintings, hued in ocher yellow and red contrasted with white and black, highlight the light, the shadows, and the shapes of his figures. Colors resulting from a mixture of tar and paint unique to the artist, are also used to cover the various materials glued to the canvas (sawdust, tissue fragments of dried paint), giving his work a breath of life.
November 2020 - December 15, 2020
This exhibition tells stories about community, belonging, fracture & transformation; all of which are at the heart of many changes being felt in cities across the globe.
The exhibited artists inhabit spaces and lives in cities across the African diaspora navigating, weathering, and even leveraging the forces of gentrification, urbanization, and globalization. The cities are burnished by lived experience of a peoples oppressed who continue to rise and convince all who experience their vitality of an innovative future. This future is one the world is increasingly paying attention to.
These artworks are available for sale at the aKAZ!ATL office. Works by Douts Ndoye, Pierre Antonio Goho, and Marvin Kehinde Omende are gratefully exhibited courtesy of Jean Patrick Guichard.
October 2019 - January 2020
“Those most impacted by injustice, inequality and poverty have the power, resources, and support to create transformational changes.” Global Innovation Hub Team, 2019
Patrizia Moroso, a well known global contemporary artist and interior designer noted: “... the African continent is extraordinarily rich in creativity, materials and ideas that are sources of inspiration and nourishment for all of us ... when applied to design, they engender products which exude tradition and modernity, innovation and history, as well as form and beauty.”
For the launch of the CARE Global Innovation Hub, aKAZ!.ATL has selected to showcase African innovation in design through the ages with an exhibition entitled “African Fabrics: Ancient and New”! The African continent has a long history of handwoven, hand dyed and artisanal fabrics which has evolved through local resources, aesthetics and contact with the wider world. Delving into the history of these fabrics tells a fascinating story of movements through cultures and continents: appropriation, misappropriation and finally full artistic ownership and leverage.
The current age of the internet means that these ancient traditions are now being innovated and seen across the world which in turn infuses them with modern design. Artists and artisans across the continent are taking these fabrics with full cultural and creative agency and morphing them into creations that are literally ricocheting across the art and design world. aKAZ!ATL with its showcase hopes to give a series of snapshot views into both the original and classic fabrics as well as the modern uses which have the potential to transform livelihoods one person, one family and one community at a time.