Primary Sources presents the work of Njideka Akunyili, Meleko Mokgosi and Xaviera Simmons, the 2011–12 artists in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. All three artists use appropriated source material and imagery, mediating and reinterpreting their initial contexts through painting and photography. A primary source is original documentation of a specific historical moment, often used to inform later interpretations or analyses of that time period. For Akunyili, Mokgosi and Simmons, such material provides the starting point for artistic practices that are deeply invested in histories—recent and distant, personal and global—to make artworks situated in the immediate present.