Items14The creator’s order
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El AnatsuiThe 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…0 - 2
William KentridgeBorn Apr 28, 1955Kentridge 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…0 - 3
Julie MehretuBorn Nov 28, 1970Mehretu'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…0 - 4
Zanele MuholiTwo 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…0 - 5
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…0 - 6
Yinka ShonibareBorn Aug 9, 1962Shonibare'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…0 - 7
Wangechi MutuBorn Jun 22, 1972Mutu'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…0 - 8
Njideka Akunyili CrosbyAkunyili 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…0 - 9
Amoako BoafoBoafo 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…0 - 10
Marlene DumasDumas 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,…0
