Modern African Art: Schools, Workshops and Individual Visions

Modernity, modernism and the problem of the map

Modern African art has no single birthplace, founding manifesto or common visual language. Its histories encompass the reorganisation of artistic education, the struggle against colonial rule, new forms of patronage, and artists’ deliberate reconsideration of inherited practices. They also include migration, religious change, urban entertainment and the circulation of images. A continental account becomes useful when it connects these histories without making them interchangeable.

Three terms require care. Modernity concerns changing social and historical conditions; modernism describes artistic projects that respond to, or challenge, such conditions; modern art is a broader historical designation whose boundaries vary between places and institutions. No single year separates the modern from the contemporary across Africa. Nor does a work become modern simply by resembling European abstraction. Naturalistic portraiture, carved religious sculpture and popular urban painting can also articulate modern artistic positions.

This survey therefore distinguishes a school as an institution of teaching, a workshop as a setting for production and exchange, and a movement as a more or less articulated collective project. A label such as the Khartoum School can also be a retrospective category. The distinctions matter: they keep individual artists visible and prevent a convenient map of names from becoming an explanation of everything made within a country. ¹

Colonial education and artistic authority

Colonial institutions helped determine who could train, exhibit and be recognised as an artist. They often separated African objects classified as ethnographic material from European work treated as individually authored fine art. Modern African artists negotiated these unequal distinctions through very different means: formal education, independent practice, religious commissions, literary associations and collective initiatives.

Aina Onabolu’s commitment to naturalistic painting in Nigeria offers an important starting point. His example challenges the assumption that resistance must look formally unlike European art. Academic drawing and portraiture could become instruments for asserting African professional competence and the right to an artistic education. The relevant question is what an artist made those forms do, for whom, and under which conditions. Later Nigerian modernists would formulate other answers without cancelling the significance of that earlier struggle. ^{1, 2}

Cairo: Art et Liberté and international dissent

Founded in Cairo in December 1938, Art et Liberté brought together writers and artists including Georges Henein, Ramses Younan, Kamel el-Telmisany and Fouad Kamel. Its opposition to fascism and the policing of culture located Egyptian surrealism within an international political struggle. Distorted bodies and unsettling conjunctions could expose social violence rather than offer escape from it.

The group also complicates a history told exclusively through cultural nationalism. An African modernism could reject both colonial domination and demands for a narrowly national style. Its members’ transnational affiliations were part of their activity in Egypt, not evidence that their work belonged somewhere else. Cairo consequently belongs within the history of African modern art without being treated as a peripheral version of Paris. ³

Casablanca and the Maghreb: changing the school and its public

At the Casablanca Art School, reform concerned the curriculum as well as the image. Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, Mohammed Chabâa and the art historian Toni Maraini questioned colonial teaching and the hierarchy separating fine art from local material and visual knowledge. Maraini’s first-person account distinguishes the arrival of Melehi and herself in 1964 from Chabâa’s appointment in 1966: the collective developed over time rather than appearing fully formed.

Research into craft, architecture, signs and design was joined to experimentation with abstraction and public presentation. The School of Casablanca exhibition project documents this broader effort to change the relationship between artistic education and everyday visual experience. The public for modern art was something to be created, not simply an audience waiting inside a museum. This makes pedagogy, graphic design and exhibitions integral to the art history.

The Maghreb should nevertheless not be collapsed into Casablanca. In Algeria, the Aouchem group, associated with Choukri Mesli and Denis Martinez from 1967, pursued a distinct engagement with signs and cultural memory. Comparing these initiatives reveals a shared problem of cultural self-definition after colonial rule; it does not establish a single North African style or an interchangeable programme. ^{4, 5, 6}

Dakar: Négritude, patronage and disagreement

In independent Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor placed culture near the centre of the national project. The École de Dakar is inseparable from this relationship between artistic production, Négritude and state patronage. Elizabeth Harney’s study frames the history through the interaction of art, politics and the avant-garde, a useful corrective to treating the label as a purely formal description.

Iba Ndiaye demonstrates the limits of stylistic generalisation. Invited back to Senegal to help establish national fine-art education, he continued to develop a painting grounded in sustained looking and diverse sources. The Metropolitan Museum’s account of Tabaski III (1970) places its Senegalese subject in relation to his study of European painting. Neither side of that conversation requires the other to disappear.

State support could create opportunities while also generating expectations about what national art should be. The subsequent critical history, including Laboratoire Agit’Art and Issa Samb, belongs within the discussion rather than outside it. Dakar is most productively understood as a field of positions, institutions and disagreements, not a consensus that every Senegalese artist shared. ^{7, 8}

Ghana: cultural sovereignty beyond the easel

Ghana provides another reason to look beyond painting as the sole measure of modernism. Kofi Antubam’s work as artist, educator and writer, the subject of Atta Kwami’s study, places artistic practice within a wider cultural project. The relationship between individual invention and a public language of national identity requires attention to teaching and applied forms as well as autonomous pictures.

Methodologically, the consequence is substantial. A history assembled only from portable paintings can miss the work through which modern art entered civic and ceremonial life. Ghana should be studied through its own institutions and debates, rather than treated as an appendix to a neighbouring country’s better-known school. The same caution applies whenever an exhibition catalogue or a market category seems to stand in for a complete national history. ⁹

Nigeria: Zaria, natural synthesis and Nsukka

The artists associated with the Zaria Art Society in the late 1950s included Uche Okeke, Demas Nwoko, Bruce Onobrakpeya and Yusuf Grillo. Their challenge to a colonial educational inheritance was not a demand to stop learning from outside Nigeria. It concerned the authority to decide how different bodies of knowledge could be brought together. Okeke’s formulation of natural synthesis articulated that selective, active process.

Natural synthesis should therefore not be mistaken for a recipe that produced one recognisable appearance. Distinct engagements with narrative, printmaking, architecture, drawing and painting emerged from related debates. Okeke-Agulu’s Postcolonial Modernism situates Nigerian artistic transformation within decolonisation; the framework encourages attention to intellectual and political agency rather than a checklist of borrowed motifs.

Nsukka developed a related but distinct history around the University of Nigeria. The Smithsonian account identifies Okeke’s leadership from December 1970 and the importance of uli and nsibidi to subsequent experimentation. Uli, associated with women’s body and wall painting, offered resources of line, interval and organisation that could be reconsidered in other media. This was a process of interpretation, not the mechanical preservation of an unchanged tradition.

Naming the practitioners who sustained those visual practices is essential. The museum’s record of Agbaejije Anunobi creating a mural helps restore attention to an artist whose work informed the larger conversation. A history that praises university modernists while rendering their sources anonymous repeats the very hierarchy it claims to overcome. Nsukka asks us to study encounters between named makers as well as the institutional visibility of their outcomes. ^{1, 10, 11, 12}

Oshogbo and the Fakeye lineage: related settings, different histories

Oshogbo became an important setting for artistic experimentation through workshops and exchanges involving visual art, theatre and writing. Artists associated with that environment, including Twins Seven Seven, Jimoh Buraimoh, Rufus Ogundele and Asiru Olatunde, developed markedly different practices. Their work cannot be adequately described by a single category such as visionary painting: media, narrative structures and material invention vary considerably.

Adebisi Akanji’s Screen, in the National Museum of African Art, is a useful reminder of that diversity. The collection record connects the object to the exhibition Concrete Vision: Oshogbo Art in the 1960s. Looking at such works expands the discussion beyond easel painting and asks how workshop encounters enabled particular artists without reducing their authorship to the intentions of organisers.

The Fakeye carving lineage belongs to another history of apprenticeship and professional practice. Lamidi Fakeye’s family training, his work in Oye-Ekiti and his later career demonstrate how inherited Yoruba sculptural knowledge could operate within changing religious and institutional settings. Akin and Gani Fakeye must likewise be considered individually. Geographical and cultural connections do not justify turning the family into a branch of the Oshogbo workshops. Our separate essays on Oshogbo and the Fakeye family develop these distinctions. ^{13, 14}

Khartoum: calligraphy and the limits of a collective label

The Khartoum School is associated particularly with artists such as Ibrahim El-Salahi and Ahmed Shibrain, but the term should not imply an official membership or a common formula. The Sharjah Art Foundation’s historical exhibition treats it as a field of evolving positions. Arabic calligraphy, African visual resources and international modernist experimentation entered into relationships that differed between artists and across their careers.

Shibrain’s Smithsonian collection record also makes visible exchanges involving teachers and intellectual networks, including Denis Williams and Ulli Beier. Such connections complicate a national map: ideas travelled between African centres as well as between Africa and Europe. The later Crystalist project, associated with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag and younger artists, further prevents the Khartoum label from becoming a permanent definition of Sudanese modern art. Its critical value lies in opening a history of experimentation rather than closing one. ^{15, 16}

Ethiopia and East Africa: institutions, travel and independent routes

Alexander Skunder Boghossian’s work brings Ethiopian visual histories into a transnational artistic career. The Metropolitan Museum’s record of Cross of Church and Butterfly discusses connections to Ethiopian church art and healing scrolls alongside his experience abroad. The example resists a choice between local inheritance and international modernism: an artist could transform the relation between them.

Makerere offers a different institutional history. In its annotation of Sunanda K. Sanyal’s dissertation, the Smithsonian reading list foregrounds Margaret Trowell, missionary assumptions and the colonial context of artistic education. It also describes subsequent generations and political disruptions. An account centred only on a founding European teacher would miss the African artists and teachers who changed the institution’s direction.

Independent practices also require room in the narrative. Jak Katarikawe and Kivuthi Mbuno cannot be assigned to a school simply because they worked within East Africa. For artists whose careers developed beyond the standard academic route, close study of individual formation, materials and image-making is more useful than the supposedly explanatory label of self-taught. The absence of formal enrolment does not mean the absence of learning, artistic exchange or sophisticated choices. ^{17, 18}

Brazzaville and Kinshasa: two Congolese histories

The Poto-Poto School in Brazzaville, founded in 1951 under Pierre Lods, became a setting in which painting, teaching and the circulation of work were closely connected. Its subsequent life must include the agency of African artists and former students, rather than remain a perpetual extension of its founder’s biography. The Rhodes College collection project provides one institutional entry into that history.

Across the river, the urban painting associated with Kinshasa followed a different trajectory. Moke, Chéri Samba, Pierre Bodo and Chéri Chérin belong to a discussion of public life, social commentary and popular image-making that cannot be explained through Poto-Poto. The distinction is geographical, political and artistic: Brazzaville and Kinshasa are capitals of different states, not alternative names for one cultural setting.

MoMA’s conversation on Moke and Congolese popular painting connects images to the city and its social worlds. Popular does not mean formally unsophisticated or historically marginal. These paintings can be understood as public arguments: they organise recognisable scenes so that viewers can judge behaviour, authority and the conditions of urban life. See also our essays on Poto-Poto and Congolese popular painting. ^{19, 20}

Mozambique: historical consciousness and colonial violence

Malangatana’s development makes the relation between artistic formation and colonial violence particularly difficult to separate. The Gulbenkian Foundation’s archival account places his work within the cultural networks of Mozambique and the repression of the colonial period. Dense, entangled figures should consequently not be treated as illustrations of an unspecified, timeless African imagination.

Edward Alpers’s study of representation and historical consciousness, described in the Smithsonian catalogue, supplies a further historical framework. Painting and sculpture can register changing understandings of collective experience without becoming straightforward political documents. Alberto Chissano, Ernesto Shikhani and the wider history of Makonde carving require attention to their distinct practices. Their inclusion in a Mozambican narrative is a starting point for comparison, not proof that they formed one school or spoke with a single voice. ^{21, 22}

South Africa: unequal access and alternative infrastructures

South African modern art cannot be separated from the restrictions through which racial segregation and apartheid organised access to education, professional recognition and public space. Artists such as Gerard Sekoto and Ernest Mancoba also prevent the history from beginning only with later training centres. Individual careers, including migration and exile, exceed the boundaries of any single institution.

Polly Street and Rorke’s Drift nevertheless matter because teaching environments could create opportunities where access was unequal. The histories published by South African History Online and the South African History Archive help situate these centres within their social circumstances. Their importance is not evidence of a uniform output. The relation between art and craft, available materials, teaching and professional survival deserves the same close analysis as style. Access to a workshop could change an artist’s possibilities without determining every artistic decision. ^{23, 24}

Zimbabwe and Shona sculpture: a modern movement and a disputed name

The modern stone sculpture that developed in Zimbabwe from the late 1950s onwards is indispensable to this account. Shona sculpture is a widely used name for the movement, but it is also a contested historical category. It should not be taken to mean that every artist grouped under it is ethnically Shona, or that every sculpture directly embodies a shared body of beliefs. Nor should the modern movement be presented as the uninterrupted survival of the stone carving of Great Zimbabwe. Connections require evidence, not resemblance or promotional repetition.

Several histories intersect. Mission-based education at Cyrene and Serima, Joram Mariga’s activity around Nyanga, the National Gallery workshop associated with Frank McEwen, and Tengenenge under Tom Blomefield were distinct settings. The Smithsonian’s annotated bibliography is useful precisely because it identifies multiple centres and records scholarship critical of a single origin story. African artists were participants in and makers of these histories, not raw material discovered by European patrons.

Individual authorship should therefore remain central. Bernard Matemera, Henry Munyaradzi, Nicholas Mukomberanwa, the Takawira artists and Fanizani Akuda cannot be adequately understood as examples of one anonymous collective expression. The British Museum’s record of Mukomberanwa’s Family offers an opportunity to look at the organisation of figures and the particular sculptor’s handling of stone. Such object-based study is the necessary counterpart to a history of institutions.

The international circulation of the work also shaped its interpretation. Pujan Karambeigi’s archival study of MoMA’s 1968–1970 touring exhibition shows exhibition-making, classification, valuation and sale operating together. Museum recognition was not a neutral last stage after production: it helped organise the terms on which the sculptures became visible. This does not make the artists passive products of a market. It makes their choices part of a modern system of production and exchange.

The movement is thus best approached through several questions at once: who made the work, where and under which conditions; how the material was selected and worked; and who described, exhibited and circulated the object. Cultural meaning remains important, but cannot be inferred automatically from nationality, an animal subject or a polished surface. Our Shona sculpture essay provides a complementary introduction; the critical literature listed below helps qualify the familiar label. ^{25, 26, 27}

Reading across schools without erasing differences

These histories share problems rather than a common solution. Zaria and Casablanca invite comparison around the transformation of education; Dakar and Ghana around cultural authority and public life; Oshogbo, Poto-Poto and Zimbabwe around workshops, patronage and authorship. Such comparisons are analytical proposals, not claims that the institutions were identical or that one movement directly caused another.

They also expose gaps in familiar narratives. Women who sustained visual knowledge can disappear behind the names of male modernists; teachers, theatre practitioners and writers can be omitted from histories organised only around saleable objects. Reconstructing their contributions changes the account of how art was made. It also cautions against treating the present distribution of museum collections as an objective measure of past importance.

A useful history of modern African art must remain open to revision as archives, attributions and collections become better known. The artists discussed here do not exhaust the continent, and a gallery’s current inventory cannot define its historical boundaries. Individual works should lead back to biographies, institutions and debates; those histories should, in turn, sharpen our ability to see what makes a particular work distinct. ^{1, 5, 7, 25}