CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary African Art
Art made since about 1970 by artists from across Africa and its diaspora, in every medium from painting and photography to installation.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Contemporary African Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Contemporary art from Africa spans more than fifty countries and many languages, religions and histories, so it resists any single story. Many of its artists came of age in the decades after independence and work with nationhood, cities, migration, memory and the image of Africa held elsewhere.
In Kinshasa, Chéri Samba painted crowded, text-filled scenes of urban life, and Bodys Isek Kingelez built fantastical model cities from card, paper and packaging. El Anatsui, working in Nigeria, turned flattened bottle tops and copper wire into huge, shimmering hangings. In South Africa, William Kentridge made animated films from repeatedly erased charcoal drawings, while photographers such as Santu Mofokeng and Jo Ractliffe recorded land and lives shaped by apartheid. In Tunisia, Nja Mahdaoui composed pictures from invented calligraphic signs. Biennials in Dakar and elsewhere, along with art schools and independent spaces, have given these practices platforms on the continent itself.