The global contemporary art industry has come a long way since the 1960s when the idea of “art as investment” took hold. Today, the global art market is valued at $50 billion, a value derived from art sales, mostly by collectors based in the U.S., Europe and East Asia. The past five years have seen African art explode in the global market, spurred by the record-setting sales of works by artists like Ben Enwonwu, El Anatsui, Njideka Akunyili-Crosby and Amoako Boafo. Last year, the African art market ranked the second highest in terms of market confidence. Still, African art sales constitute less than one percent of all global art sales at Sotheby’s, where the largest volume of African art sales are made, according to Hannah O’Leary, the firm’s head of Modern and Contemporary African Art. Given that high-end art is one of the most manipulated markets in the world, what does this mean for African artists, gallerists and art fairs organisers making a living through the industry? How are the African women in the industry navigating the network of value that determines this industry and its asymmetric cash flows?
For African women in the contemporary African art industry, participating in the business of art is a risk worth taking. From international fairs like 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, museums like South Africa’s Zeitz MOCAA, galleries such as the Los Angeles and Lagos-based Rele Gallery and non-profits like Uganda’s 32° East, African women are making strides in building a sustainable ecosystem for African art across the continent and in the diaspora. Regardless of sectoral position or geographical location, the challenges they face are rooted in the politics of value embedded in the global art industry as we know it today. Both monetary and cultural capital in the industry accumulates in the West. From artists to fair organisers, sustaining oneself or one’s organisation as an African art worker is always a labour of advocacy first. Within and outside the continent, society is yet to be thoroughly convinced of the necessity and value of African art. Often, this means that time, money and resources go into labour that is not duly rewarded. Yet, when the risks do pay off, they pay in cash and an inalienable legacy. African women are at the forefront of rethinking and redesigning the institutions and the infrastructure in the African art industry to make it a more rewarding venture for art workers and consumers alike.
Touria El Glaoui wants 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair to Become so Successful, It’s No Longer Needed
Getting to the money
Like their global counterparts, African art galleries and advisories depend on commissions from sales and many of them rely almost entirely on overseas collectors. However, a crop of art organisers remain committed to building the African art eco-system by prioritising African collectors, especially the young among them. Sabo Art is one of the youngest institutions seeking to correct this margin. Founded in 2020 by Nigerian creative consultants and curators Aziza Balogun and Sosa Omorogbe, Sabo Art is an art advisory, dealership and curatorial firm encouraging local and international audiences to engage critically with artists from Africa and of African descent.
For Balogun of Sabo Art, the “lack of public funding for cultural infrastructure means that artists-in-training have less support. Yes, there are institutions like Art X and the Yemisi Shyllon museum, both located in Lagos, but there are not enough accessible museums, galleries and collectors for African artists. Many are in tight competition for the attention of a few galleries in the same way galleries are in competition for the attention of a few collectors,” she says. “There was a time when Chinese collectors refused to buy any work that wasn't by Chinese artists and that's how they grew their artists' reputation,” she adds. It is this gap between African-based artists and the international collector-rich market that gallerists like Adenrele Sonariwo of Rele Gallery and Rakeb Sile of Addis Fine Art Gallery are bridging with their recent decisions to launch offices in Los Angeles and London, respectively.
Before these overseas expansions, both Sonariwo and Sile were pioneers in the scope and ambition of their galleries. Speaking with Sile, she emphasised that setting up Addis Fine Art in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city, was a loss-leader, financially, because it was going against the grain of the industry’s network of value. However, culturally, this decision remains critical to the success of the gallery to date. “What we tried to create was this understanding that our own people need to value the art themselves,” Sile explains. This strategic calculation of risk and return was at play again in Addis Fine Art’s expansion to London’s Cromwell Place. There, they collaborate with other galleries in a time-share model which offsets the gallery’s overhead costs significantly.
Beyond collectors, investors and sponsors also play a significant role in the sustainability of African art institutions. For Sile, finding the right investment partners can make or break one’s art business, as with any other business. “We had this steadfast and clear mission which was to elevate East African artists who are not visible on the international scene,” Sile says. “Our integrity to that mission helped us garner significant respect and recognition so that three years down the line when we started pitching for investment, it was easier to match with an investor who believed in our mission. Our brand already proved that we could make history.
Sponsors were critical to the success of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in its first two years. Founder, Touria El Glaoui, explains that “in those two years, [we] had no investment money. It was a tight budget, only seed money from sponsors and so, instead of advertising [we] relied on word of mouth.” For the first iteration of the fair, El Glaoui chose Frieze Week because many seasoned collectors would be in town. By the end of the first of five days, all galleries at the fair had sold out the collections they brought to the fair.
1-54’s introduction into the global art scene was groundbreaking—and not just because it sold out after one day. According to El Glaoui, before the fair’s first year in 2013, only 0.05 percent of artists represented on the international scene came from the continent. Run by a serendipitously all-women team since its inception, it was the first art fair to bring African galleries to the global stage in London. It remains an innovative, leading force in the industry. During the first autumn of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the only international art fair that opened in London, in conjunction with an online partnership with Christie’s which ensured a truly global reach.
“The bigger challenge now is to remain sustainable,” says El Glaoui. “With the fickle nature of the art market and its constant evolution of prices, it is important that we are able to show that African art is not a trend. This is so that the price value of African art can continue to grow without the scene becoming a fragile bubble constantly on the verge of bursting. We do this by building relationships with artists, galleries, collectors through our fair’s network and its educational programme,” El Glaoui explains. She adds that “Right now, 95% of African art at our fairs is bought by international collectors. This has to shift, ideally to the point where we have 65-70% of collectors coming from the continent. We know that we have a large pool of new millionaires and billionaires coming from the continent and they should support the art scene.”
" It is important that we are able to show that African art is not a trend."
Women artists here—they are artists only until they’re 30
For African women artists, more than any other group within the industry, making a living through art can be a precarious venture. For Yadichinma Ukoha-Kalu, an experimental multi-media artist based in Lagos, working as a commercial graphic designer and illustrator has provided stable income in between substantial, though erratic, profit from art sales. When asked how she sees other African women artists like her making the financial cut, Ukoha-Kalu says: “Thinking about all the female artists and creative business owners that I have come to know over the years, the rate of entrepreneurial success has skyrocketed. I don’t know that the global market is particularly giving us the financial cut, we’re not there yet. But we’re getting some of it, more women are taking up space and using their entrepreneurial journeys as artists, creatives and organisers to express ourselves and our cultures.”
Artists living outside central art hubs (Nigeria, South Africa, Morocco, Kenya) find it even more difficult. The story of Heba Khalifa, a visual artist and photojournalist based in Cairo, who has been practising since 2000, illustrates how difficult it is to survive as an independent artist without gallery representation or the support of private or public patrons. Before Khalifa secured gallery representation last year at the Cairo and London based Tintera Gallery (founded by two Egyptian women artists), she found it difficult to sell her work to private collectors at exhibitions due to the political nature of her art. Her provoking work raises necessary, but otherwise taboo, questions about women’s relationships with their bodies, the complexities of familial intimacy and suppression of women in her society.
As a single mother, the burden of precarity for her was even higher. To sustain a living, Khalifa worked six days a week as a photojournalist and event photographer before the COVID-19 pandemic halted gatherings. Grants and work opportunities from international organisations such as the Magnum Foundation and Arab Fund for Arts and Culture are what helped her stay afloat during this period. “If I didn’t get those grants, I honestly do not know what would have happened to me and my child. I have a community of friends and artists here in Egypt and abroad which I feel like I can rely on but it might have gotten to that, which is not a great place to be for someone who works to make a living. There’s no real support infrastructure for artists here,” she says.
Teesa Bahana, the current director of the independent non-profit 32° East|Ugandan Arts Trust, counts it an advantage that she was not fully cognisant of the gap in infrastructure before she left her previous job at a development non-profit. Today, she is leading the organisation in its fundraising campaign to build Uganda’s first-ever purpose-built contemporary art centre. 32° East is making up for the lack of government support in fostering art as a public good for all. Without the profit pressure, institutions like 32° East can nurture more artists whose work is not considered readily viable for commerce or those still figuring it out. Previously, its financial sustenance typically came from European foundations, funded by European ministries of culture. She says they’ve been lucky to receive funding with little to no strings attached. Restrictions in arts funding can sometimes look like a stipulation that no more than 10 percent of the budget be spent on administration costs, or an insistence on the submission of one’s boarding pass stub or motorcycle ticket before expenses can be filed, for example. Yet, strings or no strings, unjustly arduous visa application processes often pose a barrier for artists and art organisers to access support from foreign institutions nonetheless.
The entrepreneurial grit of African women has been essential not only for financial reasons but also for scaling cultural barriers that come with gender, age and race. On the continent, “you find that women are particularly more active as students and once they graduate, they tend to become encumbered by expectations put on them that limit the freedom and flexibility to pursue art full time,” Bahana says. “Expectations of domestic labour continue to fall disproportionately on women, from homemaking, raising children, taking care of the elderly, etc. And so, women are not allowed or encouraged to take more risks with their careers and their lives. We also find a lot of misogynistic work made by men which gets a pass because the majority of their peers are men who do not call them out.”
In the diaspora, racism continues to blight African women’s experience in the art world as it does every other facet of their lives. Sakhile Matlhare of the Frankfurt-based Sakhile & Me gallery cited instances of opening the door to gallery visitors who walk right past her, ignoring her greetings and introductions. These experiences show how African women have had to develop a distinct skill set in order to navigate the barriers they face within the industry.
Eating and feeding the passion
Though not always enough, passion makes it easier to shoulder these challenges. Passion turns out to be a double-edged sword for African women as they navigate the art industry; it often cajoles them into self-sacrifice. Advocacy, through different methods such as research, media activism and informal mentoring, encourages women to invest their time, energy and money into the industry while simultaneously eating into theirs. Matlhare of Sakhile & Me refers to this reality as “the invisible labour of sustaining creative life.” While she recognises that the impact of the work of African artists and art organisers often takes years to manifest, she considers art necessary for the culture and community because of how it pushes us to question the hierarchies of knowledge production and distribution that define our world.
Across sectors in the contemporary art scene on the continent and diaspora, African women are designing innovative solutions to address the under-valuing of African art and the labour of African art entrepreneurs. Freda Isingoma’s KIISA Art Investment and Advisory is a pioneer in the art investment sector for how it leverages expertise to enable clients to participate in alternative asset platforms. Yaa Addae’s There are New Suns online global community facilitates discussions and residencies on decolonising the art world. From Modupeola Fadugba’s Dear Young Artist Project to Yagazie Emezi’s Consumption of the Black Model, artists are probing and challenging the industry’s current political dynamic. The reverberating message from these women is: “we can make the contemporary art industry work for us too.”
