Nu Africans Presented By Maurice Evans and Grace Kisa

On View at Hammonds House Museum

What do we inherit? What do we choose to remember? How does identity change across generations, cultures, and borders? And how can we imagine ourselves beyond the identities history has assigned to us?

Nu Africans brings together artists Grace Kisa and Maurice Evans in a compelling exploration of Black identity, ancestry, memory, migration, kinship, power, and possibility.

The project began through a series of conversations between Kisa, born in Nairobi, Kenya, and Evans, born in Smyrna, Tennessee and raised in Georgia. Their exchanges examined the sometimes complicated relationship between Africans on the Continent and Africans throughout the Diaspora while recognizing the histories, cultural practices, memories, and experiences that connect them.

Evans describes African-descended people shaped by the particular histories of the Diaspora as “Nu Africans.” The term proposes identity not as something fixed by geography, but as a state of becoming—formed through ancestral memory while continually transformed by migration, displacement, oppression, resistance, cultural exchange, technology, and contemporary life.

Inspired by African warriors, queens, and histories, Kisa and Evans transform contemporary Black women into warriors, queens, and goddesses. Costumed by Kisa and photographed by Evans, these figures belong neither solely to history nor to an imagined future. They are women of the present, carrying the experiences that brought them here while embodying possibilities for what comes next.

The exhibition also expands into Kisa's sculptural practice, where found and repurposed materials, African astronomy and cosmology, migration, digital networks, and ancestral knowledge become interconnected systems of memory and orientation. Her sculptures operate as portals where histories converge and fragmented experiences can be reassembled into something new.

Together, the artists create a conversation between Africa and its Diaspora, ancestry and innovation, memory and possibility, the physical and digital, and history and future.

At its heart, Nu Africans proposes that Africanness is neither singular nor static. It is plural, dynamic, and continually being made.

The exhibition invites audiences to reconsider where we come from, recognize who we are becoming, and imagine the many futures that become possible when heritage is understood not as a limitation, but as a source of creative power.