Over the past decade, interest in paintings by black artists that depict black people has risen steadily in the art market, in contrast to more abstract works by black artists. The most famous of the former group—Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—are leading the way in international sales and exhibitions. But the problem with black figurative art, especially since the 2020 global uprisings against racism and police brutality, has been the way that the label has become a box that the art world stuffs black artists and black people in, like skeletons in a cupboard. Black figurative art is, at times, too neat, too tidy, a visual shorthand that allows white liberals to wash their hands clean of racist accusations while at the same time refusing to properly or deeply engage with the variety of black art and experience. When Louis Armstrong sang about the whole world smiling with you, he wasn’t just talking about mimesis, the replicas that unfurl from a single grin. His words speak to the ways that black people become trends and commodities. What we do, the world copies. But at the end of the day, the white man gets paid.

Curated by Alayo Akinkugbe, the founder of ablackhistoryofart and the podcast A Shared Gaze, The Whole World Smiles with You is an alternative vision of black figurative art. Akinkugbe’s curation is attuned to both time-honored works and the weird and offbeat. On display are the modernist-looking Untitled painting by Chris Ofili, a gouache on charcoal and gold leaf paper of two black lovers, trim as silhouettes, crimson lips locked in a kiss reminiscent of Rene Magritte’s The Lovers; as well as the zany and punning Still Got Your Back by Adjei Tawiah. Tawiah’s painting is a portrait of two bare-chested black men; one dressed in blue boxers carrying the other wearing white boxers with a sunflower print. A study in contrasts. The show excels at taking itself seriously but not too seriously at the same time.

Alayo’s distinct pairings offer a new way of curating black figurative art. She points out that despite the unpredictability of the art market and public opinion, “figuration will always be relevant.” But with the exhibition, she hoped to “nuance the idea of what black figuration is,” by bringing “together the works of emerging artists that [I] admire, with more established artists that Opera has access to.” The balancing of these different perspectives and relationships to the black figurative art canon is what makes the show visually striking—a walk off the beaten path of black art history. Taken as a whole, these paintings might not necessarily be speaking the same language or addressing one another directly, but there is a music to the subtle notes of discordance. The kind of pleasure derived from the refusal to match.