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El Anatsui
The starting point for most people, and for good reason. Born in Anyako, Ghana, in 1944, El Anatsui works thousands of colored metal bottle caps into hangings that fold and ripple like cloth, so a gallery wall reads as both sculpture and textile. Venice gave him the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2015, and his Behind the Red Moon was Tate Modern's 2023-24 Hyundai Commission.
He is still making new series: 2026 brought new works to White Cube in Seoul and Hong Kong, built entirely from salvaged caps. See one in person if you can; photographs flatten the light moving across the metal.
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William Kentridge
Born
Kentridge draws, films the drawing, changes it and films again, so his animated films carry the smudged ghosts of every erased line. Born in Johannesburg in 1955 and still working from a studio there, he has spent four decades moving between drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking and stage productions, and the stage work matters as much as the gallery work.
The best way in right now is Bozar in Brussels, where I am not me, the horse is not mine runs from September 18, 2026, to March 7, 2027, built around several of his major productions with new wall drawings made for the building. If you only know one Kentridge film, this is where the whole practice makes sense.
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Julie Mehretu
Born
Mehretu's huge abstract paintings layer architectural drawings and map-like aerial views of cities under storms of marks, so a canvas feels like a city seen during an upheaval. She was born in Addis Ababa in 1970 and works in New York, and her Ensemble at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2024 was the largest exhibition of her work yet held in Europe.
The next chance to see her is in Cape Town. She was chosen to paint the 20th BMW Art Car, and it anchors Turning Towards the Sun at Zeitz MOCAA, shown in the museum's Atrium Bowl from December 11, 2026, to August 15, 2027, in an exhibition made with the African Film and Media Arts Collective, which she co-leads.
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Zanele Muholi
Two series explain why Muholi matters. Faces and Phases is a growing counter-archive of Black queer and trans lives in South Africa, portraits made so those lives are recorded on their own terms. Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) turns the camera around: Muholi moves from photographer to subject in striking self-portraits about agency and representation.
The work's reach is now official. Muholi received the 2026 Hasselblad Award, presented in Gothenburg on October 9, 2026, and the award exhibition at the Hasselblad Center runs until April 4, 2027. Go for the scale of the self-portraits, which hit much harder on a wall than on a screen.
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Ibrahim Mahama (artist)
Mahama works at the scale of buildings. He drew international attention by draping the Arsenale in burlap sacks at the 2015 Venice Biennale, sacks that had carried cocoa from Ghana to Europe, so the material brings its trade history with it. Parliament of Ghosts, a chamber of empty seats, turns the same thinking on Ghana's hopes after independence.
He has also put his success back into Tamale, in northern Ghana, where he built art centers including Red Clay, a studio site that holds old trains from the country's mining railways. In Paris, The Harvest Season fills the Fondation Cartier until February 28, 2027, the fullest current look at his work.
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Yinka Shonibare
Born
Shonibare's signature is brightly colored batik fabric, used to dress figures from European history so that colonial history and today's globalized culture collide in a single costume. The British-Nigerian artist's headless figures are witty first and pointed second, which is why they work so well in historic museums.
The clearest example is in London right now: the National Gallery shows his Mr and Mrs Andrews without their Heads (1998) beside the Gainsborough painting it answers, until February 7, 2027. In the US, Sanctuary at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum runs until January 3, 2027, with the American debut of his installation Sanctuary City.
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Wangechi Mutu
Born
Mutu's figures fuse women, animals, plants and spirits into beings that feel both ancient and science fiction. Born in Nairobi in 1972 and working between New York and Nairobi, she carries that strangeness from collage into bronze, as in the four seated figures she made in 2019 for the long-empty niches of the Met's Fifth Avenue facade.
At this year's Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, which closes on November 22, 2026, she shows The End, Where All began, EdEN, an installation re-imagining the Garden of Eden, plus SimbiSiren, a five-meter bronze water spirit by the Arsenale harbor. Next comes London: as the National Gallery's Contemporary Fellow, she has an exhibition there from October 9, 2027.
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Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Akunyili Crosby paints domestic scenes on paper and builds them up with transferred photographs, so a quiet interior carries layers of imagery in its walls, floors and clothes. Look closely: the patterns are the point, and for a Nigerian-born artist working in the US they hold more than one home in a single room.
Her reach grew again in 2026, when her first official joint portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama was unveiled for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. The painting, The Obamas: Springing Forth, uses the same mix of acrylic, colored pencil, charcoal and transfers that defines her gallery work.
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Amoako Boafo
Boafo paints skin with his fingers instead of a brush, so every face and arm in his portraits of Black sitters keeps the swirl of the hand that made it, set against flat, bright grounds. Born in Accra in 1984, he has put his success back into the city by opening dot.ateliers, a David Adjaye-designed space for artists, in 2022.
Venice is the place to catch him this fall: the Museum of Palazzo Grimani is showing his first solo exhibition in Italy, a new body of paintings timed to the Biennale, until November 22, 2026. After that, look for his portraits in museum collections and gallery shows rather than one fixed home.
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Marlene Dumas
Dumas paints faces and bodies in loose, watery washes, and the looseness is what makes them unsettling: features dissolve just as you think you have read them. Born in Cape Town in 1953, she left South Africa for the Netherlands in the 1970s and represented the Dutch at the Venice Biennale in 1995, so she belongs to two art histories at once.
The single best place to see her now is the Louvre in Paris, where the museum invited her to make Liaisons, a series of nine paintings for the great wall of the Porte des Lions atrium, on view since December 2025. Amsterdam's Stedelijk also keeps her work in its collection displays.
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Otobong Nkanga
Nkanga thinks about land, its minerals and what people take from it, and her monumental woven tapestries turn that thinking into color you can stand inside. Born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1974 and based in Antwerp, she moves between drawing, textile and sculpture, and it all connects back to the earth.
Her standing on the continent is clear: Zeitz MOCAA gave her its 2025 Honorary Award for Artistic Excellence, and Koyo Kouoh, the museum's executive director and chief curator until her death in May 2025, co-curated her exhibition Acts at the Crossroads in 2019. The current way to see her at full scale is I dreamt of you in colours at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden, with tapestries and many drawings, from October 10, 2026, to March 28, 2027.
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John Akomfrah
Born
For anyone who thinks contemporary art means objects, Akomfrah is the reminder that some of the most moving work happens on screens. Born in Accra in 1957 and raised in London, he was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982, and his multi-screen installations weave archive footage, new film and sound into essays on memory, migration and colonial history.
Listening All Night to the Rain, made for the British Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, is still touring. Its next stop is Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland, from December 5, 2026, to March 21, 2027. Give it real time; it is built to be sat through, not glanced at.
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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
The people in Yiadom-Boakye's portraits do not exist. She invents her Black sitters rather than painting models, figures untethered to any particular time or place, so each canvas suggests a whole life without any of the usual portrait business of wealth or status.
Born in London in 1977 to Ghanaian parents, she is the most self-contained painter here, and her work rewards the slow kind of looking. Tate holds three of her paintings, The Generosity (2010), 10pm Saturday (2012) and Razorbill (2020), so London is a good place to begin.
More about Lynette Yiadom-Boakye14
Chris Ofili
Born
Ofili made his name in 1990s London with dazzling paintings built from resin, glitter, collage and, famously, elephant dung, and in 1998 he won the Turner Prize. Born in Manchester in 1968 to a family of Nigerian heritage, he has lived in Trinidad since 2005, and the island's landscapes, nights and traditions now run through his color.
Tate's The Upper Room, thirteen paintings of a rhesus macaque, each in a different color, set in a chapel-like space, is the work to know. For something current, Turin's Pinacoteca Agnelli shows his paintings in dialogue with Manet from October 30, 2026, to April 4, 2027, and London's Hayward Gallery plans his largest London show since 2010 for September 2027.
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