The Index✳

An anthology of Black diasporic perspectives on design, bringing together more than 70 voices across education, art, research, and practice. Essays and conversations explore identity, representation, and the futures that designers can shape. Full title: The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection.

A monograph on the Ghanaian painter and preacher Kwame Akoto, known as Almighty God. Sign painting, portraiture, spiritual messages, and everyday life in Kumasi meet in an unmistakable visual language. Published for the 2026 exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris.

Photographs from FESTAC '77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, which drew more than 15,000 artists and performers from 55 nations to Lagos in early 1977. Nance photographed the festival for the North American delegation and made over 1,500 images; most had never been published before this book.

The catalogue for the Fondation Cartier's survey of ninety years of Congolese art, running from the painters of the 1920s through to contemporary practice. Painting, photography, sculpture, comics and music are set side by side rather than separated by medium.

The first book devoted to Jacob Lawrence's Nigeria series, set alongside the Mbari Club — the writers' and artists' circle in Ibadan that gave the journal Black Orpheus its orbit. It reads post-independence Nigeria as a centre of modernist art and publishing rather than a periphery.

Portraits of the sapeurs of Brazzaville and Kinshasa — followers of La Sape, who build a culture of tailoring, colour and bearing out of modest means. Zaidi photographed them at home, at work and in the street between 2017 and 2019.

A survey of African making recorded on site in the early 1970s — weaving, casting, carving, dyeing and pottery documented as working processes rather than finished objects. Full title: Contemporary African Arts and Crafts: On-Site Working with Art Forms and Processes.

Posters from Nasser Road, the Kampala street where Uganda's political printing is done, collected and set against photographs of the city they are made for. This is the Nasser Road Edition, produced in Uganda.

The book made for Jafa's Louisiana exhibition, assembling the found images, film stills and collected material his work draws on. Design by Studio Claus Due.

The catalogue for MoMA's exhibition on photographic portraiture and Pan-African political thought, reading the studio portrait as a place where ideas of selfhood and solidarity were worked out. A lead essay by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, with Momtaza Mehri and Yasmina Price, and reprinted texts by Brent Hayes Edwards and V. Y. Mudimbe.

Black hair read as art, history and politics at once — from African antecedents through the Atlantic crossing to the salon, the barbershop and the contemporary gallery. Published for the exhibition at the Kent State University Museum.

Sidibé's portraits returned to the hand-painted glass-and-card frames he had made for them, so that the border is as much the work as the picture. The frames came out of a collaboration with the artist Cheickna Touré and his sons, begun in the early 2000s. The cover carries the signage of Sidibé's own Bamako studio.

Hair salons photographed across the tropics — Matonge in Brussels, then Addis Ababa, Shire, Abidjan, Grand-Bassam, Accra, Banjul, and on to Dhaka, Havana and Jericoacoara. Muschel reads the salon as a kind of chapel: the chair a throne, the comb and clipper laid out like altar things.

The eighty-first album in RSF's long-running series, given over to the eye of Bamako: studio portraits by day, the parties by night. Sold to fund the organisation's work for journalists, with a dossier on press freedom bound in at the back.

Six years of research into how experimental artists of colour have gone after liberation since the 1960s, written as lyric essays, interviews and ekphrastic poems. Duplan reads Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry and Nathaniel Mackey through three lenses — the personal, the social and the existential.

A Paris collective takes the name of the defunct pan-African airline and the logic of its in-flight magazine, Balafon, and makes an annual of its own. The second issue takes up the myth of flight and the way travelling shapes Afro-diasporic life; on the cover, in white on a white spiral stair, the astrophysicist Fatoumata Kébé. Launched at UNESCO headquarters in Paris in April 2025.

A keepsake booklet made for SPF, the first group show at Special Special in New York, running from May to August 2018. Texts and images pulled straight out of the conversations between the artists and the curator.

An anthology on what fashion does with dirt — the stain and the worn patch promoted to ornament, rebellion and proof of a life lived in the clothes. Westwood, McQueen and Margiela sit alongside arguments about waste, luxury and the ecological bind.

The twenty-second issue of A Magazine, handed over to Grace Wales Bonner and built out of her research: archival portfolios and ephemera set against newly commissioned essays, poems, paintings and portraits, with Black portraiture as the thread. New work shot in Los Angeles, London, Miami, Paris and New York by Ming Smith, Zoë Ghertner, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Tyler Mitchell, among others.

A bilingual queer zine out of Mexico City — queerness, mental health and trauma held together, frustrated with the present and still hopeful about what comes next. The cover line reads: reflections for queer folk and those who love them.

Four pamphlets from a series begun in the year of Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Mike Brown and Tamir Rice, each a single text in its own colour: Arthur Jafa's My Black Death, Frantz Fanon's The Fact of Blackness, W. E. B. Du Bois's Of the Dawn of Freedom and Sylvia Wynter's No Humans Involved. Year of issue is not printed on the copies held here.

A survey of Akomfrah's work — memory, the aftermath of empire, and the lives of migrant diasporas, carried in multi-screen film. Published for the exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, with an interview with the artist.

An anthology of Black diasporic perspectives on design, bringing together more than 70 voices across education, art, research, and practice. Essays and conversations explore identity, representation, and the futures that designers can shape. Full title: The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection.

A monograph on the Ghanaian painter and preacher Kwame Akoto, known as Almighty God. Sign painting, portraiture, spiritual messages, and everyday life in Kumasi meet in an unmistakable visual language. Published for the 2026 exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris.