MoAD Reopens With Its Imagination ‘Unbound’

We walk among giants. Paragons whose vision rises above the Earth, and whose example lifts us with them, toward a freer tomorrow.

Unbound: Art, Blackness and the Universe, a new exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), is physically confined by four walls. But its central proposal goes like this: What if humankind could release itself from terrestrial limitations — and in the process, transcend religion, technology and myth as well?

It may seem like a heady concept. But the first exhibition at the newly reopened MoAD, which spent six months closed for lighting and HVAC upgrades, is both visually and cerebrally stunning, and delivers on its promise more often than not. Expanding beyond familiar staples from the past decade of art spaces’ fixation on Afrofuturism, it challenges the viewer not to reflect backward, but to push forward in newness and courage.

Take Didier Williams’ painting Dark Shores, depicting three running figures whose faceless bodies are alive with vibration, streaks of light blue energy floating around their heads. Can we, mere mortals, hope to achieve this state of being while racing toward an unknown destination?

Doing so requires seeing the world in new ways, like Lorna Simpson’s Blue Turned Temporal. Its massive landscape of a blue and iceberg-like monument is flecked with slim, vertical columns of partial text. Is the text the interruption on the landscape? Or is the landscape the dreamlike picture of possibility beyond our text- and screen-heavy existence?

Call me a hater, but two artists’ use of AI in the show doesn’t exactly scream “liberation from tech.” However, Harmonia Rosales’ renaissance-style painting Creation Story, Oasa DuVerney’s assured graphite works, Barkley L. Hendricks’ wonderful No Moon at All for Phineas — all reward close viewing. (Look for the faintest pink outline of high heels.)

Meanwhile, Gustavo Nazareno’s The Secret Matrices of Creation has an immediate effect. His nine large-scale Orishas — divine figures that, according to exhibition curator Key Jo Lee, Nazareno painted in just four months — alternately emerge and hide from darkness.

Unbound is part of the second annual Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, launched by MoAD in 2024. This year’s edition boasts more than 40 participating venues, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Southern Exposure, the Oakland Museum of California and even SFO’s international terminal. Also participating are the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — two neighbors of MoAD along a once-teeming corridor where the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the California Historical Society now sit closed, and the Mexican Museum shows no signs of ever opening.

All of which makes MoAD’s reopening very welcome indeed. Celebrating its 20 years of existence, a separate exhibition called Continuum: MoAD Over Time includes works by Lava Thomas, Richard Mayhew, Ramekon O’Arwisters and others. It also recaps shows from the past two decades, and remembers its initial opening in 2005 — spearheaded in part by the late journalist Belva Davis.

As part of a tribute to Davis in Continuum, MoAD Director Monetta White remembers Davis, who worked at KQED for 35 years, as a “force,” an “icon” and “towering figure.” In other words, a paragon whose vision rose above the Earth, bringing MoAD along with her. With Unbound, MoAD is clearly furthering her example.

‘Unbound: Art, Blackness and the Universe’ is on view through Aug. 16, 2026, and ‘Continuum’ is on view through March 1, 2026, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (685 Mission St., San Francisco). Tickets and more information here.