CAMBRIDGE — Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's collection of African traditional art includes bold, expressive masks, vessels, and figures — carved in wood, cast in bronze, sometimes adorned with beads or feathers. We don't know who made them. We do know how they were made.

For photographer Dawoud Bey, activism and art have long been linked. Bey, whose portraits of Harlem form the centerpiece of the exhibit "Harlem: Found Ways‚" now at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, first connected with his chosen visual medium through a protest.

Through July 15, Harvard's Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art analyzes the history and changes in a historic neighborhood in "Harlem: Found Ways.‚" Anchored by two photo series by Dawoud Bey, created 40 years apart, the exhibit highlights the gentrification that's changing Harlem's identity as a famed black culture capital.

The Afro-Cuban painter Juan Roberto Diago came of age in the 1990s in the midst of a firestorm. The collapse of the Soviet Union devastated Cuban trade and the island's economy suffered a teeth-jarring blow. Famine followed. Social unrest was inevitable.

On Tuesday, September 30th, David Adjaye, principal of AD100 firm Adjaye Associates, will receive Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Medal for outstanding work in the field of African and African American Studies. Fittingly, the medal, whose past recipients include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and author Chinua Achebe, will be awarded in the university' Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the façade of which Adjaye designed.

Architect for the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art featured in The New Yorker:

"The National Museum of African American History and Culture, on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is a little more than two years away from its scheduled opening. When I visited the site in June with David Adjaye, the Ghanaian-British architect who won an international competition in 2009 to design the building, it was a five-acre hole in the ground. Construction din made conversation impossible, so Adjaye asked the foreman to drive us to the other end, where we sat under...