The medium is the message
here: bright colors, flashy imagery, comic
book-style fonts, and commentary in the
style of LP record liner notes evoke what
Robert Farris Thompson (1973) dubbed
an “aesthetic of the cool,” a distinctive
pan-African sensibility that is polyrhythmic,
highly immersive, and predicated on the
free-flowing circulation of intersubjective
experience and energies between audience,
artist, and performer.

Dumouchelle cleverly integrates the familiar genre of the art catalogue with the look and feel of a graphic
novel, recalling the dynamism of superherocomics series. The book also has the look and feel of some of the greatest African and diasporic musical albums, from Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s Black President and King
Sunny Ade’s Juju to Bob Marley and the Wailer’s Exodus. Appropriately, the volume is presented in conjunction with an irresistible musical playlist...

Dumouchelle...has installed works from the museum’s collection in a dazzling, provocative way. Pairing the classical with the contemporary, he ...engages audiences with an interactive digital app, a lively playlist piped in to the museum’s atrium (available on Spotify), and splashy fonts and bold graphics for the wall text. Taken together, such strategies yield an immersive and playful experience that draws audiences of all ages into a dense survey of aesthetic and political history.

Heroes is, above all accessible. There are literally and conceptually multiple points of entry into the show, and elementary school groups and scholars alike find different vantages from which to connect with the objects, all concisely situated both in history and, anew, in their connection to the show’s titular “principles of African greatness.”

Heroes begins the work of creating a new pantheon during a time of political turbulence, and takes seriously a host of ongoing debates about the arts of Africa in national collections.