Why African Art
African art is commanding unprecedented attention on the global stage, but who gets to shape its narrative, define its value, and determine how its stories are told? As African and diaspora artists, curators, and scholars challenge longstanding institutional traditions and reclaim ownership of their cultural narratives, the conversation is shifting from representation to authorship. Africa.com interviewed Dr. Tayler Ava Friar, an art historian, curator, Fulbright Scholar, and founder of ART|unknown, about the forces reshaping the African art world, the importance of preserving artistic identity amid growing international interest, and what it will take to build lasting opportunities for future generations. In this thought-provoking interview, Friar makes a compelling case that the future of African art is not simply about gaining greater visibility, but about ensuring that African voices have the authority to define their own stories.
1. Africa’s contemporary art scene is drawing growing global attention. What do you think is driving this moment, and what still gets overlooked or misunderstood about it?
What we’re witnessing isn’t a discovery — it’s a correction. The infrastructure is finally catching up to work that has always been rigorous: biennales, fairs, and institutions are opening doors that should have opened decades ago. This year, I had the good fortune to witness the late Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial vision for the Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys — the first time in the exhibition’s 131-year history that an African woman shaped its overall direction — a record thirteen African nations hosted national pavilions, four of them stepping onto that stage for the very first time. That is not a footnote. That is a continent no longer asking for a seat.
What I think is actually driving this moment is that African and diasporic curators are no longer only being invited into institutions — they’re running them. Kouoh’s work as the Executive Director of the Zeitz MOCAA is a great example. As another example, Brooklyn Museum curator Ernestine White-Mifetu is leading a sweeping rebuild of the museum’s Arts of Africa galleries, set to open in 2027, organizing the collection around geographic and transcultural logics — rivers, coastlines, trade routes — instead of the colonial-era borders that shaped it for generations. As she’s put it, “the diaspora is Africa’s story,” not an addendum to it. That’s the real engine here: not simply a spike in market interest, but Diasporic curators sitting in the rooms where institutional decisions actually get made, and rebuilding the frameworks from the inside.
What gets overlooked is the labor underneath that kind of shift. It isn’t a rebrand — it’s the result of decades of scholarship, activism, and artist-led pressure finally reaching the institutions with the power to act on it. The danger is that the market moves faster than the meaning — we must celebrate the visibility while continuing to champion the interpretive work that makes the visibility consistent.
2. How do you navigate the tension between introducing African and diaspora art to wider audiences and protecting it from being flattened or commodified?
I hold two commitments at once: invitation and refusal. Invitation, because I want people in the room — new audiences deserve a real door, not a locked one dressed up as reverence. Refusal, because once they’re in the room, I won’t let the work be simplified into a single story just because a single story travels more easily.
In the current landscape we find ourselves in, there’s an illusion out there that this space is contracting, that the moment has peaked. I don’t see it that way. Look at the growth of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair — it launched in London in 2013 as a single fair and now runs three annual editions, in London, New York, and Marrakech, plus a pop-up in Paris. That’s not a bubble; that’s infrastructure. The opportunity for people willing to actually lean in — to sit with the intricacy of the work instead of consuming it at a glance — is expanding, not shrinking. What encourages me is the pattern underneath it: audiences increasingly wanting engagement that goes deeper than acquisition or novelty alone.
My own research — a fifteen-year project tracing historical Black creatives in places like Vietnam, Serbia, Germany, Mexico, and Türkiye — has taught me that flattening usually happens at the level of geography before it happens at the level of aesthetics. We reduce continents to moods and decades to trends, when the diaspora is in fact vast: Black creative life shows up in places most people would never think to look for it, and it loses nothing by being there. Through my organization, I explore that through speaking, curation, and public programming — building platforms where an artist’s specificity isn’t smoothed over in the name of accessibility. Commodification thrives on abstraction. My work is to keep putting the particular back into the frame.
3. Who gets to define what “African art” means today, and how do you see artists themselves reclaiming that authorship?
Historically, the answer was: almost everyone except the artist. Colonial ethnography, then the Western market, then perhaps a handful of gatekeeping institutions — authorship kept living everywhere but with the people making the work. That has shifted massively, and not by accident.
Consider this year’s Biennale itself: for the first time in its 131-year history, the exhibition’s central vision was conceived by an African woman, the curator Koyo Kouoh — a shift from being represented within someone else’s frame to authoring the frame itself, a vision her team carried forward with great care after her passing. And within that frame, Somalia arrived with its first-ever national pavilion, SADDEXLEEY, structured around an indigenous Somali poetic form built on threes — three artists, three floors, three registers — rather than a curatorial language borrowed from elsewhere. A debut on the world’s biggest art stage, built in a vocabulary the artists already owned. A debut on the world’s biggest art stage, and they still chose to define the terms in their own vocabulary rather than a more legible, imported one. That’s the model: artists and thinkers alike are no longer waiting for definition to be handed down. They’re intervening directly in the institution, the frame, the exhibition itself. Definition is no longer descending from above — it’s being authored from inside the work, by the people who have always had the most authority to speak to it. My role, as a historian and curator, is to build the scaffolding that lets that authorship stand.
4. What responsibility, if any, do artists have in addressing the social and political issues shaping the continent and its diaspora right now?
I don’t believe art carries an obligation to be didactic, but I do believe it cannot be neutral — and most African and diaspora artists working today already know this. Politics isn’t a subject they must choose to address; it’s the material condition their work is made inside of, whether or not it names itself as political.
What I resist is the expectation that African and diaspora artists must justify their work through struggle to be taken seriously — that joy, abstraction, or interiority are somehow less legitimate than testimony. The responsibility, if there is one, is to work honestly from wherever they stand, without performing trauma for an audience that mistakes it for authenticity. Some of the most politically resonant work I’ve encountered says nothing about politics directly at all — it simply insists on complexity, on interior life, on beauty that owes no one an explanation.
5. When you imagine the next generation of African and diaspora artists, what cultural shifts do you hope they inherit — and what do you hope they leave behind?
I hope they inherit infrastructure rather than just access — permanent galleries, endowed positions, publishing relationships, and archives built specifically to hold their work, not temporary spotlights that flicker off once the market’s attention moves elsewhere. I hope they inherit institutions that have already done the work of acknowledging and dismantling the colonial taxonomies that so many historians, curators, and artists before them have spent generations pushing against, so that generation can walk into rooms built for their thinking rather than rooms they have to first renovate.
What I hope they leave behind is the burden of being singular — the pressure to be the representative voice for an entire continent or diaspora, as if African and diaspora art were one conversation rather than thousands of overlapping ones. My own research explores the elsewheres found by Black creatives all over the world — geographies most people would never expect to find them in — and one thing keeps proving true: mobility doesn’t dilute a voice, it expands it. I want the next generation to inherit that same freedom: to be specific, to be many things at once, and to never again have to overjustify their work
