The Collection

Cassi Namoda is a painter whose work moves fluidly between the personal and the historical, the wondrous and the sorrowful. Born to a Mozambican mother and an American father, she spent her formative years across Mozambique, Haiti, Kenya, Uganda, Benin, and the United States — a nomadic upbringing that shaped her distinctly Luso-African perspective. Originally trained in cinema, she brings a filmmaker's sensibility to her practice, often working from photographs that read like film stills — quiet, ordinary moments charged with deeper meaning. Her canvases draw on an expansive symbolic vocabulary: indigenous spiritual traditions, post-colonial history, European art history, folklore, and literary references converge in compositions that feel simultaneously archival and alive. Recurring figures move through landscapes — rural and urban, real and surreal — in scenes that carry the weight of collective memory alongside an atmosphere of magical realism.

In 2024, Namoda presented her most significant institutional exhibition on the African continent, Is it sunny or cloudy in the land you live on? at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town. In 2025, she was selected for the window commission at Turner Contemporary, Margate, and her work appeared in When We See Us, a major travelling survey of Pan-African figurative painting at Bozar, Brussels, and in the 16th Sharjah Biennial. In 2026, she presents her first institutional solo exhibition in the United States at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Virginia. Other solo exhibitions include Life has become a foreign language at Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2022); To Live Long is To See Much at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2020); and Bar Texas, 1971 at Library Street Collective, Detroit (2017).

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Baltimore Museum of Art, MACAAL in Marrakesh, the Long Museum Shanghai, Inhotim Museum Brazil, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. Namoda lives and works in Italy.