Innovation as much as preservation is the impulse behind “The Architecture of Francis Kere: Building for Community,” a snapshot-sized look at a Berlin-based architect who has done much of his formative work in his home village, Gando, in Burkina Faso. His projects there — schools, a library, housing — have been based on homegrown construction methods enhanced by imported technology. It’s a model he’s followed elsewhere in Africa — in the extraordinary Center for Earth Architecture, in Mopti, Mali — and more recently in China, Europe and the Middle East, designing public spaces that promote a village-based ethos of cooperation.

Cultural tides move in many directions, and Africa gets as much as it gives. It got something fabulous when, a century or so ago, a modest Dutch textile manufacturer began sending brilliantly colored and patterned fabrics its way. This story is told in “Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage,” by far the most vivacious of the “Creative Africa” shows. Vlisco is the modern name of the company, which is in the Netherlands and still producing wax-printed fabric styles so closely associated with West African and Central African fashion that most people assume that they are African-made.

Where Africa can lay creative claim to them is at the marketing level. It is in Africa that the Vlisco designs have always been given their identifying names, some cozy, some extravagant: Happy Family, Sword of Kingship, Love Bomb, Ungrateful Husband, Hibiscus, Mercedes Benz. These change from region to region; some are generations old. But whatever they’re called, the patterns are eye-popping, and the museum has lined four walls of a gallery with samples of them.