Delphine Diallo brings her portrait practice into the AI image

Delphine Diallo’s The Mythic Quest opened at the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta on 18 September. Across six series, the French-Senegalese artist moves between photographs, collage, moving images and AI, with Black women’s agency at the centre. The museum describes her portraits as emerging from sustained, reciprocal relationships with their subjects.[1]

That history gives the AI work a particular question: how does an artist carry an established way of seeing into a medium that can generate a figure without a photographic sitting? The exhibition provides earlier work against which to consider the answer. A convincing image alone would tell us much less about the choices that made it.

A portrait practice before the prompt

The show previously ran at Virginia’s Taubman Museum of Art from 4 April to 18 May 2025. Its catalogue places Hybrid I, a digital photograph from the Highness series, in 2011. Transmutation, from Golden Age, is also labelled digital photography, dated 2022. Trinity, from Kush, follows in 2023, identified as a digital art print created with an AI prompt.[2]

Those medium labels make a useful starting point. The date an image was made and the method used to make it answer different questions. Reading them together lets a viewer trace continuity without treating every part of a mixed exhibition as AI-generated.

Taubman’s account also describes Diallo’s self-portraits, constructed dream scenes and combinations of photographs, drawings and found imagery. Her wish to “give photographs” expresses a relationship to the person represented. Staging and assembling an image were already part of her practice before the AI prints entered the catalogue.[2]

The distinction matters because authorship can be found in more than the instant an image appears. Selecting a pose, building a scene and deciding how a figure should be encountered can carry an artistic position. In this reading of the exhibition, the earlier photographs give the viewer a vocabulary for examining the later work.

The body as source material

Reporting from Diallo’s ADAMA Arts Salon conversation for Rough Draft, Sherri Daye Scott describes the artist using Midjourney for stills and Runway and Kling for animation. Diallo’s named working method, the NA’TERA Embodiment Protocol, takes her breathing, gestures and movement as source material. She presents AI as a “ritual collaborator”, an account of her creative relationship with the tools.[3]

Scott also reports that Motherverse clips and stills appear in the show. Diallo is the developing video project’s creator, writer and director; she shapes generated imagery through editing, sound design and narrative direction.[3]

The method makes a useful artistic demand: the generated figure should belong to an existing visual world. That gives the work a criterion more specific than polish. Does a movement or a sequence develop the character and imagery the artist has established? Does the resulting figure retain a distinctive presence? Those are questions a viewer can pursue even without knowing the settings inside an image generator.

ADAMA frames the exhibition around the Black female gaze and the authority to represent oneself. That makes the relationship between the works central to the show’s argument.[1]

A useful way into The Mythic Quest is therefore to begin with one earlier portrait, note its date and medium, and then look for what carries into an AI print or moving image. The point of contact might be a gesture, an arrangement of the body or a recurring symbol. Following that thread gives the generated image an artistic history to answer to.

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