ADAMA Presents Brother, Brother: The Interior Lives of Black Men Featuring Select Works from the CCH Pounder-Koné Collection
ATLANTA, GA — The African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA) proudly announces its final exhibition of 2025: Brother, Brother: The Interior Lives of Black Men. Select Works from the CCH Pounder-Kone Collection (Nov. 14, 2025 – Jan. 16, 2026). Featuring 30 works from the distinguished CCH Pounder-Koné Collection, the exhibition presents diverse and nuanced portraits of Black masculinity by artists from across the African Diaspora.
From contemporary Caribbean painting to traditional African sculpture, Brother, Brother offers glimpses into the rarely considered intimate and interior lives of Black men—challenging stereotypes and expanding the ways their humanity is seen, felt, and understood.
Exhibition Details
Title: Brother, Brother: The Interior Lives of Black Men. Select Works from the CCH Pounder-Koné Collection
Dates: November 14, 2025 – January 16, 2026
Venue: African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA)
Opening Reception: Friday, November 14, 7:00-9:00 PM
Curatorial Vision
Brother, Brother: The Interior Lives of Black Men offers a critical intervention in masculinity studies by challenging long-held stereotypes and reductive representations of Black men. Too often, images of Black masculinity have been shaped by tropes of aggression, absence, or pathology. This exhibition instead illuminates the complexity of Black men’s lives, emphasizing emotional depth, quiet reflection, tenderness, and unbowed dignity.
In her essay “From Angry Boys to Angry Men”, bell hooks reminds us that Black boys endure a “double jeopardy”. Racial biases subject Black men and boys to patriarchal norms that suppress vulnerability, but also burden them with a psychohistory that frames them as “castrated, ineffectual, irresponsible, and not real men.” Brother, Brother resists this cycle of distortion. Through 30 works drawn from the CCH Pounder-Koné Collection, the exhibition insists on visibility for the intimate, nuanced, and interior experiences of Black men, inviting audiences to reimagine masculinity not as constraint, but as a site of liberation, wholeness, and self-determination.
Why It Matters
Continuing ADAMA’s annual tradition of closing each calendar year with an exhibition of works from prominent private collections, Brother, Brother highlights the power of collecting legacies in amplifying African and Diasporic art and culture.
Drawn from the private collection of CCH Pounder-Koné, an acclaimed actress and internationally recognized arts advocate, the works gathered here reveal profound explorations of Black male identity and interiority. With a collection of more than 500 works and as co-founder of the Musée Boribana in Dakar with her late husband Boubacar Koné, which they gifted to the nation in 2014, Pounder-Koné has spent decades building a legacy that preserves, celebrates, and advances African and Diasporic voices.
About CCH Pounder-Koné
Award-winning actress CCH Pounder has been extensively involved in the arts as a patron, collector, gallery owner, and museum founder. Her private collection of more than 500 works features artists from the Caribbean, Africa, and the African Diaspora, spanning contemporary art and traditional African sculpture.
In 1992, Pounder-Koné and her late husband, Boubacar Koné, founded the Musée Boribana, the first privately owned contemporary art museum in Dakar, Senegal, which they gifted to the nation in 2014. Works from her collection have been exhibited internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Portrait Gallery in London, Somerset House in England, Spelman College Museum of Art, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago and the African American Museum of Art in Philadelphia.
About ADAMA
The African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA) amplifies the creativity and innovation of the global African Diaspora through immersive exhibitions, performances, and dialogue. With an unwavering commitment to storytelling and cultural stewardship, ADAMA fosters connection across place and time. Learn more at www.adamatl.org.