Each week on Africans to Watch, we spotlight Africans shaping the global narrative of African Art, Architecture, and Design—pushing boundaries, reclaiming stories, and forging bold new creative futures. These creatives are not merely participating in global events; they are actively setting the agenda, with their influence spanning major international biennales, record-breaking auctions, and cutting-edge design showrooms. Their work compels a global audience to re-examine established canons and embrace a more inclusive and complex understanding of contemporary African creativity, confirming that the continent is a primary source of architectural, artistic, and design innovation worldwide. Their collective impact is redefining what African excellence looks like on the global stage, proving that a deep connection to heritage can fuel the most forward-thinking creative practices.
Art
🇬🇠Ibrahim Mahama (Ghana, Art)
A celebrated Ghanaian artist, Ibrahim Mahama recently earned the prestigious 2025 Art Basel & UBS Artist of the Year Award, an honor he dedicated to the pioneering curator Koyo Kouoh, underscoring a commitment to collective achievement over individual accolades. Mahama is globally renowned for his colossal, transformative installations that use repurposed materials, most famously the jute sacks employed in the global commodity trade, to excavate the socio-political histories of Ghana and the wider continent. His work speaks to the material legacy of colonialism, labor, and economic decay, transforming discarded objects into profound cultural and historical monuments that force a confrontation with past and present inequalities. Earlier this year, his significant solo presentation at Kunsthalle Bern (April 30–June 1, 2025) featured an installation responding to the institution’s history and the colonial footprint of the Swiss cocoa trade with Ghana, highlighting his focus on how global capitalism unfolds upon local materials. Through monumental scale and site-specific interventions, Mahama’s practice is a form of “time travel,” using crisis and failure as generative materials to develop a new aesthetic language that documents inadequately told African histories and envisions future possibilities.
🇬🇠Amoako Boafo (Ghana, Art)
Amoako Boafo has rapidly become one of the most compelling voices in contemporary portraiture, celebrated for his elegant, emotionally charged paintings that reframe Black identity with bold intimacy and style. His distinct technique of applying oil paint with his fingertips, rather than a brush, gives his subjects a unique, expressive texture that emphasizes their character, confidence, and internal life, creating a powerful sense of direct touch and vulnerability. This technique was at the heart of his debut London solo exhibition with Gagosian, I Do Not Come to You by Chance (April 10–May 24, 2025), a show that moved beyond the gallery walls to incorporate architectural elements designed in collaboration with Glenn DeRoche. The exhibition featured new portraits embedded within structures that reimagined the courtyard of his childhood home in Accra, emphasizing themes of community, self-determination, and the rich domestic life often overlooked in global narratives. Boafo’s work is a direct challenge to the historical underrepresentation of Black figures in art, creating images that celebrate the richness and complexity of the lived African and diasporic experience.
🇲🇦 Meriem Bennani (Morocco, Art)
Moroccan-American artist Meriem Bennani, a fellow 2025 Art Basel Awards medalist in the Emerging Artist category, is reshaping how we view digital and video art by blending pop culture, North African heritage, and a futuristic, often satirical, storytelling approach. Her groundbreaking installations—which often combine video projections mapped onto sculptural viewing stations—speak to the hybrid nature of contemporary cultural flows and the dynamics of diasporic life in a networked world. Bennani’s work is celebrated for its incisive humor and ability to navigate serious themes of migration, identity, and globalization through the lens of animation, science fiction, and reality television tropes, reflecting the disjointed yet vibrant state of modern media consumption. Her ability to create immersive, multimedia environments that are both playful and sharply observational has made her one of the most sought-after artists working today, with her recent sound installation, Sole Crushing, at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, using a mechanically animated orchestra of flip-flops to explore themes of protest and collective emotion. Bennani’s witty and inventive digital aesthetic reaffirms the power of family, home, and resistance in the face of global systems of power.
🇿🇦 Marlene Dumas (South Africa, Art)
South African painter Marlene Dumas cemented her historic legacy in the contemporary art market with the sale of her monumental 1997 painting, Miss January, which fetched $13.6 million (with fees) at Christie’s New York in May 2025. This record-breaking price set a new auction high-water mark for any work by a living female artist, reaffirming her place in the top echelon of global art history. Known for her emotionally intense, tension-filled figurative paintings, Dumas’s practice draws from photographic sources to explore complex themes of sexuality, racial identity, the female body, and the human condition. The record-setting painting, a towering portrait depicting a semi-nude beauty queen, directly revisits her lifelong interest in female representation and the objectification of the body, echoing her earliest known drawing, Miss World. Dumas, who lives and works in Amsterdam, uses the liquidity and expressiveness of oil paint to create works that are both visually arresting and psychologically profound, making her a vital reference point for contemporary artists across the globe.
Architecture and Design
🇳🇬 Tosin Oshinowo (Nigeria, Architecture)
Tosin Oshinowo, the founder of Oshinowo Studio, earned a well-deserved Special Mention at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale for her installation, Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos. Her project passionately argues for recognizing Lagos’s informal markets—such as Ladipo, Computer Village, and Katangua—not as chaotic aberrations but as legitimate, highly intelligent, and self-regulating urban systems. The exhibition highlighted these markets as powerful examples of “circular urbanism,” where scarcity drives innovative processes of reuse, repair, and recirculation of goods, offering real-world alternatives to resource-intensive Western planning models. Oshinowo’s Afro-modernist design approach seeks to reimagine African cities by looking inward, bridging contemporary design with contextually responsive solutions rooted in local realities and ethnographic research. The installation itself used recycled denim from the Katangua market to create map-based visualizations, further reinforcing her core thesis that resilience and sustainability are inherent in African traditional and informal systems.
🇰🇪 Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi (Kenya, Architecture)
As co-founders of the Nairobi-based practice Cave_Bureau, Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi have emerged as powerful voices in architectural discourse, most recently as key members of the curatorial team for the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their exhibition, “GBR—Geology of Britannic Repair,” earned a Special Mention by profoundly reframing the colonial relationship between the UK and Kenya through geological and ecological narratives. The project, which physically wrapped the British Pavilion in a beaded veil of clay and agricultural waste briquettes titled Double Vision, aimed to reconnect architecture with the earth and challenge the extractivist legacies of colonialism. Inside, their installations, such as the Rift Room—featuring a bronze cast of a Kenyan Rift Valley cave—highlighted African ecological and spatial narratives as a means to theorize and enact practices of repair. Their work is an oral-architectural praxis that centers vernacular architectures and earth practices, positioning African geological and cultural landscapes as essential to understanding a vision for a regenerative global future.
🇹🇬 Jeanne Autran-Edorh (Togo, Architecture)
Jeanne Autran-Edorh, the co-founder of the interdisciplinary practice Studio NEiDA, was the key curator for Togo’s inaugural National Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, a landmark event titled Considering Togo’s Architectural Heritage. The exhibition was a vibrant celebration of Togo’s diverse built legacy, bridging traditional knowledge—like the ancient Nôk cave dwellings—with the nation’s imaginative, often eccentric, modernist experiments that emerged after independence. Autran-Edorh’s curatorial vision documented and elevated structures like the now-abandoned Hôtel de la Paix, affectionately known as the “kissing hotel,” and Afro-Brazilian architecture brought back by formerly enslaved Togolese, reframing them as legitimate and unique contributions to global modernist narratives. Her practice and the pavilion’s message are a powerful call to action, advocating for the preservation and revaluation of African architectural heritage as a guide for contextual, climate-compatible future approaches that are rooted in local material culture and craftsmanship.
🇳🇪 Mariam Issoufou (Niger, Architecture)
Nigerien architect Mariam Issoufou was commissioned to design the new Rolex Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, which she conceived as a radiant testament to sustainability, craftsmanship, and the unique cultural fabric of Venice. Issoufou’s design elegantly embodies material circularity and timeless design, taking inspiration from the city’s topography and Rolex’s own legacy of precision and durability. The structure’s exterior features a façade crafted from repurposed 200-year-old Venetian Palazzi beams, echoing the fluted bezel of Rolex watches, while the interior features dazzling terrazzo flooring made with recycled Murano glass shards (Cotisso). Her intersectional approach to sustainability extends beyond environmental factors to intentionally support the socio-economic and cultural vitality of local Venetian craftspeople, as seen in the translucent colored ceiling composed of circular glass discs created by renowned Murano glassmakers, Vistosi. The pavilion serves as a microcosm of how high design can harmonize with its environment and celebrate local artisanal heritage through low-impact, fully recyclable construction methods.
🇪🇹 Jomo Tariku (Ethiopia, Design)
Ethiopian-American industrial designer Jomo Tariku is a pioneering voice in modern African design, working to cultivate a lifelong appreciation for elevated African aesthetics in global design conversations. His visually striking yet highly functional furniture pieces are deeply rooted in Africa’s rich cultural heritage, weaving the continent’s nature, art, and history into every detail. His iconic Nyala Chair, which was notably selected for interior scenes in the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, exemplifies his signature style, drawing inspiration from the horns and silhouette of the reserved mountain antelope native to the Bale Mountains of Ethiopia. This distinctive piece, now held in the permanent collections of major institutions like the Dallas Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, showcases outstanding craftsmanship and a timeless visual appeal that elevates African narratives. Tariku’s inclusion in major events, such as Design Miami 2025, solidifies his role in challenging the Western-centric design canon and creating heirloom pieces intended to be celebrated for generations to come.
🇳🇬 Yinka Ilori (Nigeria, Design)
Yinka Ilori, a London-based multidisciplinary artist of British-Nigerian heritage, specializes in storytelling through a joyful fusion of his two cultures, transforming public spaces with playful color and pattern. His work, which spans urban furniture, large-scale installations, and product design, draws heavily on Nigerian parables and traditional aesthetics, creating a distinctive, optimistic visual language that promotes community and happiness. From his installations for the London Design Festival to his vibrant furniture pieces, Ilori’s practice began with the innovative upcycling of vintage chairs, using them as a medium to convey narratives and bring Nigerian verbal traditions into conversation with contemporary design. His influential aesthetic—which includes the now-dismantled Colour Palace pavilion for Dulwich Picture Gallery—has made him a fast-rising star, demonstrating how design can be an accessible, humorous, and provocative tool for social impact and for creating inclusive architectures in the city.