The Facts
On September 2, 2026, the Whitney Museum of American Art announced Coumba Samba: Stars and Stripes, the first solo museum exhibition devoted to Senegalese American artist Coumba Samba. The immersive lobby gallery installation takes its title from a common phrase for the American flag and critically examines the development of nuclear power alongside the African resource extraction that has sustained it. The show extends Samba's practice of deconstructing symbols and forms that uphold the U.S. military-industrial complex, drawing on histories of modernist abstraction and minimalism. It is organized by guest curator Rujeko Hockley with curatorial assistant Antonia Pocock, with major support from the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation.
The Signal
The commission gives Samba a significant institutional platform and signals the Whitney's investment in artists who expose the political and economic conditions embedded in seemingly neutral abstract form. For curators and collectors, the project positions Samba within an expanding discourse connecting minimalism to global resource extraction and postcolonial critique—an area of growing attention in contemporary art. It also underscores the museum's lobby gallery as a venue for ambitious, site-specific commissions that speak to urgent geopolitical themes.
- Artists: Coumba Samba
- People: Rujeko Hockley, Antonia Pocock
- Museums: Whitney Museum of American Art
- Locations: New York
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