MoAD Turns 20
Continuum: MoAD Over Time
Ongoing – March 1, 2026
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Unbound:
Art, Blackness & the Universe
Ongoing – August 16, 2026
Pop the champagne corks! MoAD has reopened. 🍾
MoAD sits along a once-teeming corridor with the Contemporary Jewish Museum (temporarily closed with no reopening yet announced) the California Historical Society (permanently closed and its collection rehoused at the Stanford Libraries), not to mention the hulking and silent presence that is the Mexican Museum (which shows no signs of ever opening at this point).
All of which makes MoAD’s reopening a notable achievement and very welcome indeed, in these tenuous times.
To celebrate its indomitable spirit, MoAD brings us two powerhouse exhibitions.
Continuum
Ramekon O’Arwisters, Title not provided
Much more than a retrospective, Continuum addresses MoAD’s next frontier, showing how the Museum has been both foundational to the Bay Area’s cultural landscape and an increasingly vital global venue for art of the African Diaspora.
Through archival materials, fine artworks, the histories of signature programs and community celebrations, such as:
• Emerging Artist Program,
• MoAD in the Classroom
• Afropolitan Ball, and
• Diaspora Dinner
and with community stories and interviews, this exhibition honors MoAD’s legacy as a catalyst for Black creativity and culture while charting its expanding role on the world stage.
Organized thematically and chronologically, Continuum moves through key eras and ideas in the Museum’s evolution, tracing a living timeline from its founding, to the present and now, into the future. Visitors will encounter foundational figures, pivotal exhibitions, program milestones, innovations and visionary leadership moments. This show is designed to celebrate memory, spark reflection and invite participation.
Artists whose works appear in this exhibition: Cheryl Patrice Derricotte, Chester Higgins Jr., JoeSam., Richard Mayhew, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Gordon Parks, Lava Thomas and Sam Vernon.
Unbound:
Art, Blackness and the Universe
Owunna, The Resurrection of Eke-Nnechukwu (from his series Infinite Essence)
This otherworldly exhibition explores the intersections of Blackness and the Cosmos. It invites us to trash our image of Blackness as fixed and earthbound and to reimagine Blackness as infinite, unknowable and cosmically rich. Take a moment to imagine that we walk among giants; paragons whose vision sails above the Earth and whose example lifts us with them, toward a freer tomorrow.
While Unbound, MoAD’s second new exhibition may be physically confined by four walls,, its central proposal defies containment:
What if humankind could release itself from terrestrial limitations
and in the process, transcend religion, technology and myth as well?
Williams, Dark Shores – three running figures alive with vibration, streaks of light blue energy floating around their heads. Can we achieve this state of being while racing toward an unknown destination?
With its genesis in Curator Key Jo Lee’s essay, Gesturing Toward Infinitude: Painting Blue/Black Cosmologies, this exhibition challenges us to consider:
What if we approached Blackness
with the same wonder we bring to the universe?
What if, like a black hole or distant star,
Blackness could be a site of mystery, power and transformation?
Rosales Creation of God (the title turning our perspective around)
Worthy of serious meditation. So, to address such expansiveness, this exhibition is both visually and cerebrally stunning, and repeatedly delivers on its promise. This is not a been-there-done-that-got-the t-shirt reexamination of Afrofuturism similar to that which you may have viewed at the SFO Museum. Rather, this exhibition emphasizes MoAD’s recent announcement that its role is not to reflect backward, but to push forward with originality, innovation and courage.
Featuring a global and intergenerational group of artists, the exhibition spans painting, sculpture, installation and video. Works traverse the historical and the speculative, the scientific and the spiritual.
Three core themes guide the journey:
• Geo-Cartographic: Blackness mapped across earthly and celestial terrains.
• Religio-Mythic: Blackness as origin, cosmology and creation story.
• Techno-Cyborgian: Blackness as posthuman – shaped by technology, hybridity and the ability to move fluidly between identities. The posthuman is not one fixed form, but an evolving state of becoming, capable of multiple perspectives.
L2R: Simpson, Blue Turned Temporal (A massive landscape of a blue, iceberg-like monument is flecked with slim, vertical columns of partial text; Hendricks No Moon at All for Phineas (detail) and Nazareno, The Secret Matrices of Creation (above, three of his nine large-scale Orishas — divine figures that Nazareno painted in just four months — which alternately emerge and hide from darkness)
More than an exhibition, Unbound is a philosophical inquiry and sensory experience. A rich combination of public programs, an onsite learning lab, and the Museum’s first community-written labels ensure depth and accessibility for all visitors.
Ultimately, Unbound invites us to wonder: What else can Blackness be? When freed from institutional constraints and historical reductiveness, Blackness becomes luminous – an expansive mode of being, a cosmology of creative potential. The show invites us not to observe but to wonder. To stand at the edge of the known and look out – into the dark, where unbound possibility lives.
For more about these MoAD exhibitions, click here.
My thanks to Gabe Meline, KQED/To Do List
