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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has continued his social media campaign to stump for exhibitions staged by the city’s museums, this time focusing on a survey of West African modernist architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, whose praises he sang on Instagram early this morning.
Titled “Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa,” the 400-work show surveys architectural projects in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon produced during a period of decolonization that began in some countries in the late 1950s. Curated by Martino Stierli and Ikem Stanley Okoye, the show features architectural models and archival imagery, as well as some contemporary artworks.
“visited @themuseumofmodernart this weekend and am still thinking about their exhibition ‘architects of liberation: modernism in western africa,’” wrote Mamdani in his post.
He specifically singled out Kader Attia’s 2014 sculpture Indépendence Tchao, a sculpture composed of rows of rusting index card boxes that the Algerian French artist obtained from a French colonial police headquarters. They are topped with a sign reading “HOTEL INDÉPENDENCE,” a reference to a similarly named hotel in Dakar, Senegal.
Mamdani wrote that the sculpture asks the question: “to what extent were the visions of the independence era achieved?”
It’s the second museum presentation Mamdani has posted about in the past month. In October, to celebrate his birthday, Mamdani visited the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he took in Taylor Simmons’s painting The Hypnotist (2026). Mamdani called the work by Simmons, a current participant in the museum’s storied artists-in-residence program, “just incredible.”