In a famous photograph of W.E.B. Du Bois with Mao Zedong, both men are absolutely giddy and dressed to the nines: big smiles, stylish hats, long wool coats. That picture—and the 20th-century Afro-Asian alliances it symbolizes—was something of an impetus for “The Great Camouflage,” a show on view at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai through April 26.Co-curators X Zhu-Nowell and Kandis Williams began with a shared interest in overlapping revolutionary histories and cross-cultural solidarities. It started out as a show about racial capitalism and the role Marxist thought played in anti-imperialist movements—and those are still key themes. But along the way, the curators came across the work of so many women whose contributions, in art and in activism, were overshadowed by the men they married, among them Shirley Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Suzanne Césaire, and Grace Lee Boggs. A project about race and class quickly came to focus on gender, placing Black feminist thought at the fore.Nearly all the women invoked here were activists, but also artists: Shirley Du Bois and Amy Ashwood Garvey were playwrights, Eslanda Robeson was an actress, and Suzanne Césaire and Grace Lee Boggs were writers. They were interested not only in how revolutionary ideas were argued and made into policy, but also in how they are felt and lived.Accordingly, “The Great Camouflage,” titled after a text by Suzanne Césaire, is not a didactic show of historical objects, but one of contemporary art—works processing revolutionary histories, often from decidedly feminist perspectives.Through the lens of Black feminism, revolution becomes decidedly anti-heroic. Pope.L’s sculpture of upside-down, flailing legs, Du Bois Machine (2013), is a far-from-stoic and literally inverted monument. It swaps machismo and triumph for the voice of a little girl, emanating from a speaker placed at the figure’s groin. She tells a true story: one day, in the late 1990s, Pope.L received an envelope full of hair, skin, and dirt that allegedly belonged to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It’s practically a relic, but also gross and weird.Work by Wang Tuo Smith in the 2026 exhibition “The Great Camo Camouflage” at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.Upstairs, a video by Tuan Andrew Nguyen unearths feminist perspectives less in method than in narrative. It tells stories of Senegalese soldiers stationed in Vietnam by French colonial powers in 1954, when Vietnam was fighting for independence from France while Senegal was still a French colony. Several of these soldiers married and had children with Vietnamese women—then either abandoned them or took them back to Senegal, where harsh racial and cultural clashes too often ensued. Imperial interventions have both prompted solidarities by creating a common enemy and also tried to create divisions: there’s too much strength in numbers.The show unfolds as you climb the museum’s five stories, its crux becoming clearer as you go. It is felt—as with the Pope.L work near the entry—before it is explicated. At the top, a riveting timeline narrates major events in Afro-Asian revolutionary politics, foregrounding women’s work. We see “kitchen politics,” as one caption puts it, describing a photo of Jimmy Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, and Ted Griffin conversing at a table, but also Paul Robeson testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956, then the first Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in 1957.Work by Cauleen Smith in the 2026 exhibition “The Great Camo Camouflage” at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.The show’s recurring tensions—between activism and art, thinking and feeling, grand actions and ordinary acts of care—are hashed out most explicitly in a two-channel video installation by Onyeka Igwe. We watch a conversation around a table—more kitchen politics—featuring characters based on Sylvia Wynter, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and C.L.R. James. We also watch the screenwriters debate how to narrate their work of historical fiction: how it should be, and how it really was. In the final form, the Wynter-y woman argues that you can practice a whole new world through a play as some of her (male) interlocutors emphasize practicality and policy. Still, she keeps encouraging them to imagine: what comes after independence?Cauleen Smith’s “Ikebana” series (2010–) asks what “after” even means in a revolutionary context. Fittingly displayed both at the show’s beginning and its end, the videos show the artist creating a floral arrangement to mark the death of acquaintance after acquaintance, signaling loss after loss. Not only is she mourning and remembering the lives of various Black women; she is also drawing attention to the often invisible, ephemeral labor of grief, maintenance, and care. (I think of Mierle Laderman Ukeles: who cleans up after the revolution?) Yes, revolution can look angry—raised fists indeed punctuate the timeline—but it can also look tender, as in Smith’s videos, or gleeful, as in that photo of Mao and Du Bois.Wang Tuo also emphasizes cyclicality and repetition. His unforgettable three-channel video tells the story of a suicidal scholar, a “depressed destitute addicted to history” who comes to feel that all roads lead to the same dead end. While he thought that history might develop linearly, he sees instead that it works in cycles. Amid all the focus on feminism, I can’t help but think of the impulse to narrate the world in linear ways—before and after a single climax—as decidedly male, sexually speaking.Still another work, by Hao Jingban, raises questions about art and activism by trying to parse what revolution feels like in the body. It follows a Chinese couple who become obsessed with learning swing dance, but wonder if they can embody the form stripped from its Harlem context—a decidedly working-class art form that feels bourgeois in its vintage version. Shown in two channels, their rehearsals appear clumsy juxtaposed against archival footage of masters of their craft: the ways people learn to carry themselves and inhabit their bodies are culturally and even politically produced. Relatedly, Charlotte Zhang’s collaged curtains evoke the initial import of jazz into China, where it was dismissed as decadent and Western, eliding its Black working-class political origins.Work by Charlotte Zhang in the 2026 exhibition “The Great Camo Camouflage” at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.Throughout “The Great Camouflage,” tensions like these remain unresolved, and I left grieving and feeling hopeful at the same time. It is among the most honest and moving retellings of revolutionary histories that I’ve seen, a sobering and smart story of revolutions and their afterlives, their triumphs and their failures.In the US, it felt almost boring and obvious just a decade ago to complain about capitalism, whereas now anticapitalist expressions have come to seem unspeakable in our museums, which are increasingly controlled by the rich. But conversations about identity, I think, are inseparable from discussions of class, with capital reinforcing hierarchies of all kinds. Still, McCarthyism and the 40 years of Cold War politics that followed were so successful that even well-educated Americans often have concerning holes in our Communist histories. Luckily, Cassandra Press—central to Kandis Williams’s art practice—produced several worthy readers to accompany the show, offering versions of the curators’ research that can travel, since it’s hard to imagine their vital exhibition in a museum here. And yes, you can say that, in many respects, the revolutions on display have failed. But you can hardly argue that whatever we’re doing now is working.