The Time Is Always Now at the NCMA

Featuring 23 contemporary African diasporic artists from the United Kingdom and United States, The Time Is Always Now, on view through June 29, focuses on works of art that depict and celebrate the Black figure from the perspective of Black artists. The NCMA is the final venue for this traveling exhibition, which is organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London and curated by Ghanaian-born and UK-based writer and curator Ekow Eshun. 

There are an extraordinary number of Black artists creating figurative artworks in the 21st century. This collective interest in figuration and representation, examining the presence and absence of the Black figure in art history, illuminates the richness of Black life beyond common perceptions shaped by white society.

The exhibition explores the complexity of these narratives through the context of three major subjects: Double Consciousness, Past and Presence, and Our Aliveness.

Double Consciousness

This section, named for a term introduced in 1897 by American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, explores the experience of living as a Black person physically inside, but psychologically outside, white society. The artists in this section, including Amy Sherald, Kerry James Marshall, and Thomas J Price, create works that intertwine with the politics of perception—how people are perceived because of how they are or are not represented.

Past and Presence

Artists in this section, including Titus Kaphar, Kimanthi Donkor, and Lubaina Himid, are reinventing and rewriting art history in works of art that emphasize and honor the Black figure by creating new narratives. They challenge assumptions and ingrained responses by recontextualizing historically and culturally weighted images, forcing a reconsideration of what we expect and have been taught to see.

Our Aliveness

Artists in this section, including Henry Taylor, Njideka Akuyili Crosby, and Toyin Ojih Odutola, contextualize Black figures within universal themes found in everyday, ordinary life—love, joy, beauty, family, friendship/kinship, and memory. A sense of familiarity and vulnerability surrounds each work in this final grouping, presenting a mosaic of Black expression and the capacity to just “be.”

More on The Time Is Always Now

Want to hear from the exhibition curator? Watch Eshun delve into the imagined reality of Toyin Ojih Odutola’s The Marchioness, a work that will join the NCMA’s permanent collection after The Time Is Always Now completes its run.    

We are also offering the following exhibition-related events in the coming months:

• Exploring Identity through Pastels with Telvin Wallace, Saturday, May 17
• Docent-Led Tours, Wednesday–Sunday, by request

• The Time Is Always Now Tour with Audio Description, Thursday, June 5, Saturday, June 14