Mamdani Praises MoMA's 400-Work West African Modernism Survey

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has publicly endorsed the Museum of Modern Art's 400-work survey of West African modernist architecture, praising the exhibition on Instagram early this morning.

The show, titled "Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa," surveys architectural projects across seven countries: Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon. The works date from the decolonization era, which began in the late 1950s in some of those nations.

Martino Stierli and Ikem Stanley Okoye curated the exhibition. It combines architectural models and archival imagery with a selection of contemporary artworks.

"visited @themuseumofmodernart this weekend and am still thinking about their exhibition 'architects of liberation: modernism in western africa,'" Mamdani wrote in his post.

Which artwork did the mayor single out?

Mamdani highlighted one contemporary piece in particular: Kader Attia's 2014 sculpture Indépendence Tchao. The Algerian French artist built the work from rows of rusting index card boxes obtained from a French colonial police headquarters. A sign atop the boxes reads "HOTEL INDÉPENDENCE," a reference to a similarly named hotel in Dakar, Senegal.

The mayor quoted the question the sculpture poses: "to what extent were the visions of the independence era achieved?"

The post is the second museum endorsement Mamdani has issued in the past month. In October, celebrating his birthday, he visited the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he viewed Taylor Simmons's painting The Hypnotist (2026). Simmons is a current participant in the museum's storied artists-in-residence program. Mamdani called the work "just incredible."

The pattern is deliberate on the mayor's part. His social media campaign promotes exhibitions staged by New York City museums, turning his office into a recurring publicity channel for the city's cultural institutions.

For MoMA, the endorsement places a decolonization-era architecture survey — a subject rooted in the late 1950s and spanning seven West African nations — in front of the mayor's full audience. Attia's sculpture, with its boxes drawn directly from a French colonial police archive, gives the show a contemporary anchor that questions how independence-era ambitions played out.

Whether Mamdani continues the museum tour, his posts so far have tracked two institutions in two months, pairing an emerging Harlem painter with a major modernist survey at one of the city's flagship museums.