I've noticed that many art museums that I've visited lately have many works and exhibitions of contemporary African Art. The contemporary art scene is booming in Africa. African artists are getting more and more attention and recognition and contemporary African Art is being shown in the most prestigious art fairs around the world.
The definition of contemporary African Art is complex due to the diversity, countries, lifestyles, customs, traditions and social conceptions in each region. In addition the legacy of the diaspora caused by colonialism makes the definition even more difficult. Scholars are reluctant to define African Contemporary art in a homogenous way because each region is driven by its own contextual limitations.
Although African Art has always been contemporary to its producers, the term African Art implies a particular kind of art that has conquered or as some would say has been absorbed by the international art world and art market since the 1980's. In that decade Europe and the United States became aware of art made by individual artists, thus breaking with the colonial tradition of assuming collective or ethnic origins of so called tribal arts.
There are a number of highly lauded and respected African Artists. Amoako Boafo who was born and raised in Osu in the greater Accra Region of Ghana. He attended the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra and later continued his education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Austria.
Boafo's portraits focus on posture, clothing and the stroke of skin which he accentuates with the finger painting technique.
His works appear in such prestigious institutions as The Los Angeles County Museum, Hirschhorn Museum and the Albertina Museum as well as many private collections.
Yinka Shonibare was actually born in London in 1962, the son of Olatunji and Laide Shonibare. When he was three years old his family moved to Lagos, Nigeria.
He has exhibited in the Venice Biennale and at leading museums worldwide. In 2016 one of Shonibare's "wind sculpture" pieces was installed in front of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.
Shonebare's work explores issues of colonialism along-side those of race and class, through a range of media which include painting, sculpture, photography, installation art and more recently film and performance. He examines in particular the construction of identity and tangled relationships between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Mining Western art history and literature, he asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Having described himself as a "post-colonial hybrid," Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. While he often makes work inspired by his own life and experiences around him, he takes inspiration from around the world. As he has said, "I'm a citizen of the world. I watch television and I make work about these things."
El Anatsui is a Ghanian sculptor who has been active in most of his career in Nigeria. He has drawn particular international attention for his bottle top installations. One such work hangs at the St. Louis Art Museum. These installations consist of thousands of aluminum pieces sourced from alcohol recycling stations and sewn together with copper wire, which are then transformed into metallic, cloth like wall sculptures. The materials while surprisingly stiff and sturdy are actually free and flexible, which often helps with manipulation when installing his sculptures.
Anatsui was included in the Time Magazine list of the 100 most influential people in 2023.
Charmaine Chanakira describes her art as quirky mixtures of Manga and her Zimbabwean heritage. Her inspiration comes from listening to bands like Lady Blacksmith Mambazo and the sound of the mbira returns her consciousness to the motherland. Growing up in London left her feeling disconnected from her roots and she began to seek ways to reconnect with her ancestry. As a self-professed spiritual hippy, Chanakira believes that art unlocks different aspects of ourselves that we cannot see in our consciousness.
Julie Mehretu's abstract paintings address themes of urbanization and globalization. While Mehretu is inspired by events taking place in Africa and the Middle East, she resists interpretations of her work that fail to see past her ethnicity. The artist says that her work is not at all about blackness or otherness. She believes there is a failure to simply accept and understand that a woman of African descent is making large abstract paintings and that this is a restrictive view of what artists of color can achieve.
One of Mehretu's paintings sold for over ten million dollars in 2019 setting a record for a living African American artist.
Modou Dieng Yacine, born in St. Louis, Senegal, analyzes the "symbolic and mythological power of pop culture" through his mixed media and hybrid works .Combining painting and photography his work typically encompasses materials like burlap, cardboard, denim and wood frames and addresses his African identity and Westernized lifestyle. His distinct color palette draws from the tones and shades of the Sub-Saharan desert.
Yacine is a personal friend and when I asked him to define African Art, he told me that I had asked the toughest question that I could have come up with. There are too many answers and interpretations to this question and as you can see in this small piece not all the African Artists even reside in their country of birth or were even born in Africa,
One way or the other the works of this small group that I have chosen to talk about have created thought provoking and striking works of art.
Nancy Kranzberg has been involved in the arts community for more than forty years on numerous arts related boards.