Published February 6, 2026

"Modern Primitive" drawings by UB Art Professor shown at Smithsonian

Abdi Osman, MFA, UB Assistant Professor of Practice, has drawings from the series "Modern Primitive", in the exhibition Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art,  at the National Museum of African Art, a Smithsonian musuem in Washington D.C.

On view: January 23, 2026 – August 23, 2026

Zoom image: Vitrine containing three open notebooks aof drawings of people, in front of a red wall. Vitrine containing three open notebooks aof drawings of people, in front of a red wall.

Abdi Osman, Modern Primitive, 2021, Series of 90 drawings in 3 notebooks. Colored pencil and ink on paper. As displayed in the exhibition Here.

Zoom image: Abdi Osman, “Peasants! I tell you”, 2021, from the series Modern Primitive. Line drawing of a woman wearing pink pants, a purple shirt, and patterned blazer, with teal sunglasses and a plain paper background.

Abdi Osman, “Peasants! I tell you”, 2021, from the series Modern Primitive.

"Modern Primitive" series Artist Statement:

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a period in which people all over the globe witnessed the hypervisibility of white supremacist violence, anti-Black racism, and Black activism on a global scale. Inspired by this, Modern Primitive is a new series of drawings that I began in March 2020 that features colorful portraits of individuals who are both known and unknown to us. Using familiar cultural tropes like “Karens/Kevins,” “Anti-Maskers,” and “Anti-Vaxxers” as character studies--which are also invoked in/by each individual work’s title--Modern Primitive offers intimate glimpses of what living together as well as apart looks like and means to/for different people in a/our shared world(s) yet with diverse and distinct realities.

Resisting traditional art histories and notions of “primitivism” that are based in Eurocentric, modernist constructions of other cultures as “exotic” and “Other,” these images portray popular subjects in rough figural poses and gestures akin to how “non-white” cultures have been historically misrepresented as less sophisticated and “civilized” than white artists and “modern” cultures. Here, the white gaze and its logics that have for so long defined ethnographic portraiture and visual culture are subverted and replaced with/by a critical, contemporary, queer Black lens and gaze.

National Museum of African Art

Free, Open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily

950 Independence Ave., SW
Washington, DC

Zoom image: Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, at the National Museum of African Art, January 23 – August 23, 2026, Washington D.C. Exhibition title wall with rainbow vertical stripes, for "Here".

Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, at the National Museum of African Art, January 23 – August 23, 2026, Washington D.C.