When We Frame US

Ricky Shoebio, Destyni Swoope, Brandon Barry Brown, Kahlil Lashley, Jamal Durr, Franck Godefroy, Lucas Goly, Rushelle Anthony, Donna Kroh

Bio & Dedication

This exhibition is dedicated to the late Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025) — the visionary Cameroonian-born curator, cultural producer, and intellectual who transformed how the world encounters African and diasporic art. As the founder of RAW Material Company in Dakar, and Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, Kouoh forged an unapologetically African-centered curatorial practice — one grounded in rigor, intimacy, and the belief that visibility itself is a form of care. Her groundbreaking exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (Zeitz MOCAA, 2022) reframed how global audiences understand Black image-making, shifting the focus from representation to self-regard — from being seen to seeing ourselves. Before her untimely passing, Koyo had been appointed to curate In Minor Keys at the Venice Biennale, where she would have become the first African curator to lead the world’s most historic art exhibition. Though she left before that vision could unfold, her legacy endures as an inheritance of clarity and courage — a reminder that the act of curation can itself be a political and spiritual offering.

This presentation, When We Frame Us, stands in conversation with that legacy — a continuation of her vision and the curators who came before her, who turned the gaze into a site of power, beauty, and belonging.

Curatorial Statement

When We Frame Us unfolds in the wake of a revolution in seeing. The landmark exhibition When We See Us expanded how the world encountered Black figuration — shifting the conversation from being seen to seeing ourselves. It was not merely an exhibition, but an awakening: a curatorial turning point that affirmed the gaze as a site of power, beauty, and belonging. This presentation stands as a continuation of that lineage. It honors the women whose curatorial vision transformed visibility into care — who taught that the act of arranging, contextualizing, and naming is itself a form of authorship. Because of them, a generation of artists learned that to depict oneself is not mimicry of power, but mastery of it. Here, frame is a word in motion. It bends and reshapes itself — at once noun and verb, structure and story. To frame is to hold, to protect, to shape the boundaries of what can be seen. It is to center something tender so it will not be forgotten. But it is also to be framed — to be misread, confined, accused, or taken out of context. The same border that defines can also distort. Yet when we reclaim it, the frame becomes sacred again: a gesture of authorship, a way of saying this is how we want to be seen. And perhaps, in that act, it can illuminate for someone else what is worth being framed and admired about themselves — the quiet inheritance of self-regard that first taught me how to curate, and then, how to collect.

When We Frame Us asks: What happens when the image belongs to the subject? When the curator, the artist, and the community become co-authors of the gaze? When we hone the power of both the subject and the artist? The works gathered here exist within these questions.

Dedication

For the one who made seeing an act of care —

and for the artists who now hold the frame themselves.

-Adrielle Turner