The American Federation of Arts (AFA) announces the national tour dates for Willie Birch: Stories to Tell, chronicling the groundbreaking artist’s singular vision of the Black American experience.
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The exhibition is co-organized with the New Orleans Museum of Art, and features six decades of work (from the late 1960s to the present) representing Birch’s first career retrospective of this size and scope.
The first leg of the national tour opens at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles on May 5. Willie Birch is a New Orleans–based artist, cultural provocateur, and community organizer who has devoted his artmaking career to storytelling: “Content dictates process. I care about the story.
The process I use for the work comes after I have a story to tell,” says Willie Birch. His incisive art features a wide variety of media including paintings, large-scale drawings, wood and papier-mâché sculpture, and public art commissions.
Birch draws on sources as diverse as jazz music, Egyptian numerology, and American folk art.
“Willie Birch’s work does not shy away from the complexities of race, poverty, and systemic inequity, nor does it romanticize struggle,” says Pauline Forlenza, the Director and CEO of the AFA, in her foreword to the exhibition catalogue.
“Instead, his art holds space for contradiction — pain and joy, vulnerability and pride, endurance and resistance. Whether exploring the quiet dignity of his neighbors or the complex history of African traditions in American culture, Birch’s eye is unwavering and empathetic."
The exhibition has been booked by museums in four cities, including:
California African American Museum in Los Angeles (May 5, 2026 - Oct. 21, 2026)
New Orleans Museum of Art (March 20, 2027 - Sept. 5, 2027)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville (Oct. 28, 2027 - May 14, 2028)
Hudson River Museum, New York (Sept. 22, 2028 - Jan. 14, 2029).
Russell Lord (Chief of Curatorial Affairs at the Norman Rockwell Museum and a former curator at the New Orleans Museum of Art) will guest curate the exhibition, working in tandem with Amanda Hajjar, the AFA’s Assistant Curator and project manager for the Willie Birch exhibition.
Founded in 1909 with the goal of sharing art with people across the United States, the AFA continues to reaffirm its mission with monographic exhibitions on important artists of our time.
In keeping with this tradition of publishing catalogues with important scholarly research, the exhibition is accompanied by a 208-page hardcover book published by the AFA in association with Yale University Press ‒ available for purchase in June at https://yalebooks.yale.edu/
The book is edited by Russell Lord. Essays about the exhibition and about Birch's art are written by Russell Lord, Grace Deveney, Leslie King Hammond, and Lowery Stokes Sims, and explore the impact and legacy of Birch’s artmaking.
The exhibition is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and New Orleans Museum of Art.
Willie Birch: Stories to Tell is sponsored by Bank of America.
Major support for the exhibition and catalogue is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Significant support for the catalogue is provided by Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Additional support has been provided by Monique Schoen Warshaw and Adam Shopkorn.
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