For its first exhibition of 2024, the National Portrait Gallery presents a major survey of artists from the African diaspora. Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson, Amy Sherald, Titus Kaphar, Jennifer Packer, and 17 other contemporary artists reframe the Black figure. Curated by Ekow Eshun, the former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the exhibition underscores the lack of Black representation in Western art history and offers other forms of representation. “I want to make paintings, I want to make sculptures that are honest, that wrestle with the struggles of our past but speak to the diversity and the advances of our present,” Kaphar has said. “And we can’t do that by taking an eraser and getting rid of stuff.” These artists have instead turned to figuration as a means of inclusion and amendment. The final works, however, are like a few stars in the night sky—the more you stare, the more you realize how much has yet to come into view. —Clara Molot