At MoMA, a New Exhibition Celebrates West Africa’s Modernist Architectural Legacy

Modernist BOAD (West African Development Bank) building in Lomé, Togo, featured in MoMA’s Architects of Liberation exhibition. Photograph by François-Xavier Gbré, 2025.

In 1960, 17 African countries gained independence in what became known as the “Year of Africa.” For many of these newly sovereign nations, political freedom was only the beginning. They were confronted with what an independent African nation actually looked like, a question that stretched beyond governance and infrastructure into the continent’s creative life: art, […]