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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has taken to Instagram again to champion one of the city’s major museum exhibitions. This time, he directed public attention to a large-scale survey of West African modernist architecture currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art.
A Major Survey of West African Modernism
The exhibition, titled “Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa,” brings together 400 works. It examines architectural projects across Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon. The works focus on a period of decolonization that began in some of these countries in the late 1950s.
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Curators Martino Stierli and Ikem Stanley Okoye organized the show. It features architectural models and archival imagery, alongside a selection of contemporary artworks.
Mamdani Shares His Reaction Online
Mamdani posted about the exhibition early on Monday morning. “Visited @themuseumofmodernart this weekend and am still thinking about their exhibition ‘architects of liberation: modernism in western africa,'” he wrote on Instagram.
He highlighted one work in particular. Algerian French artist Kader Attia’s 2014 sculpture, Indépendence Tchao, caught the mayor’s attention. Attia constructed the piece from rows of rusting index card boxes he obtained from a French colonial police headquarters. A sign reading “HOTEL INDÉPENDENCE” sits on top, referencing a similarly named hotel in Dakar, Senegal.
Mamdani described the sculpture as raising a pointed question: “to what extent were the visions of the independence era achieved?”
Part of a Broader Pattern
This marks the second time in a month that Mamdani has publicly promoted a New York museum on social media. In October, he visited the Studio Museum in Harlem to celebrate his birthday. There, he viewed The Hypnotist (2026), a painting by Taylor Simmons.
Simmons currently participates in the Studio Museum’s well-known artists-in-residence program. Mamdani called the work “just incredible.” Together, both posts suggest the mayor is making a deliberate effort to use his platform to draw public interest toward the city’s cultural institutions.
