African art movements

Modern African art was never one movement. In the years around independence, groups of artists in Zaria, Osogbo, Khartoum, Dakar and Casablanca each asked the same question — what should a modern art look like in a country that has just become free? — and each gave a different answer: theory and the academy, open workshops, Arabic script, Négritude, the crafts of the souk. In Kinshasa, self-taught painters answered by ignoring the question and painting their city.

Each article explains who the artists were, what they made and what became of their ideas. For the individual careers behind them, see the artist profiles.