— Spanning six decades of the acclaimed artist’s enduring body of work, rooted in the Black community’s joys, struggles, and everyday lives —

National tour kicks off May 5th at the California African American Museum

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. 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.”

”He speaks to us from the corner of the block, from the front porch, from within the beat of the brass band and the shade of the live oak. Birch has created a body of work rooted in the everyday lives, struggles, and joys of the Black community,” says Forlenza.

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).

Street Musician with Guitar, by Willie Birch (1999). Acrylic and charcoal on paper. Private collection, Dallas. Courtesy Pettit Art Partners.

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/book/9780300286854/willie-birch/

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.

Birch was born in 1942 in New Orleans, and trained in Europe, Baltimore, and New York. His artmaking was further influenced by his experiences in the New York art scene of the 1980s and 90s.

Birch often speaks about “retentions,” a term he uses to describe cultural evidence of another culture’s traditions in Black American life.

Throughout his career, Birch has explored how African traditions have been retained in music, art, and culture in America and beyond.

The artist questions why certain things are retained and not others, unearthing uncomfortable truths about American identity, but also offering possibilities for greater cultural awareness.

The exhibition is organized chronologically and in three major sections, beginning with Birch’s earlier work in the late 1960s, continuing through his shift towards papier-mâché in the 1980s, and closing with large-scale charcoal and acrylic works on paper.

Major installation works will be interspersed in these sections, ideally separated in their own small gallery spaces.

More than 80 works are presented in the exhibition. Most come directly from the artist and Fort Gansevoort New York.

Institutional collections have generously loaned key artworks, with important works coming from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, The Delaware Contemporary, Chicago Children’s Museum, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“The American Federation of Arts is honored to co-present with the New Orleans Museum of Art the first major retrospective for Willie Birch in his long, storied career. His art is not simply about community — it is forged within it, of it, and, ultimately, for it,” adds Forlenza in the catalogue. “This exhibition celebrates an artist whose practice stands as both an aesthetic force and a vital social document. He is as much an observer as a participant, and his works carry the weight of lived experience and the light of cultural celebration,” adds Forlenza.

“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 his catalogue essay, guest curator Russell Lord states: “Willie Birch has a lot of stories to tell Over the past sixty-plus years, Birch has produced sculptures (wooden, bronze, and papier-mâché), site-specific installations, immersive installations, paintings, drawings, prints, works made from found objects (sometimes only lightly adjusted, sometimes totally transformed), even a thirteen-foot-high wooden crucifix, which is still visible in situ in a church in Baltimore.”

“While these works could not be more diverse in scale and execution, they all share one thing in common: each is designed to convey a narrative,” says Lord.

“In each of his works, we can trace a particular story, ranging from the reverberations of African ancestry in America to the lived experiences of Black Americans before and after the Civil Rights Movement. Being confronted with Birch’s works is very much like the experience of listening to him tell a story directly. The exhibition, and the catalogue that accompanies it, are an invitation to sit in conversation with Willie Birch — to look, to listen, to feel, and to experience the stories he has to tell,” adds Lord.

About the Artist

Willie Birch’s awards and accolades include: The James Baldwin Fellowship (part of the United States Artists Fellowships); the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Conference of Artists (NCA); the Governor’s Award from the state of Louisiana; and the Mayor’s Arts Award from the City of New Orleans. His fellowships include: The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Cue Art Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Birch’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at museums across the United States, including: Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette; Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts; Maryland Institute College of Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; McKinney Avenue Contemporary Museum Dallas; Perez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Sculpture Center New York, among others. Birch is represented by Fort Gansevoort New York.

He has been an artist in residence at RedLine Milwaukee; New Orleans Center for Creative Arts; Ecole superieure des beaux-arts de Nantes, France; New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation; Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque; Henry Street Settlement, New York; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY.

The exhibition is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and New Orleans Museum of Art.

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.

About the American Federation of Arts

The American Federation of Arts (AFA) is the leader in traveling exhibitions in the U.S. and worldwide. One of the first to successfully tour art exhibitions on a national and international level, the organization unites American art institutions, collectors, artists, and museums.

The AFA has toured more than 3,500 exhibitions that have been viewed by millions of people in museums in every U.S. state, and in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

A nonprofit organization founded in 1909, AFA is dedicated to enriching the public’s experience and understanding of the visual arts through organizing and touring art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishing exhibition catalogues featuring important scholarly research, and developing educational programs.

About New Orleans Museum of Art

New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), the co-organizer of this Willie Birch exhibition, is the city’s oldest fine arts institution, opened on December 16, 1911 with only nine works of art.

Today, the museum stewards a collection of nearly 50,000 works, with exceptional holdings in African art, photography, decorative arts, and Japanese art, as well as strengths in American and French art, and an expanding collection highlighting contemporary artists.

The Museum and its Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden are home to innovative exhibitions, installations, educational programs, and research. Exploring human creativity across time, cultures, and disciplines, the global scope of the museum’s initiatives open a vibrant dialogue with the history and culture of New Orleans.

The museum’s exhibitions and dynamic learning and engagement offerings serve as a forum for visitors to engage with diverse perspectives, share cultural experiences, and foster a life of learning at all ages.