This course surveys modern African art across the colonial, independence, and post-independence eras. Modern artistic practices developed in Sub-Saharan Africa as early as the 1920s and '30s among scattered independent practitioners, and in workshops run by colonial educators. Following World War II, a new generation of artists and critics rose to prominence in conjunction with the pan-Africanist Negritude movement. By the 1960s and '70s, modernist movements flourished in some African cities with support from new national governments, while socialist cultural policies often sought to modernize and nationalize local art practices, even as alarms began to sound over new patterns of authoritarianism, state collapse, and foreign intervention. Because classificatory orders in Africa were never so commanding as they tend to be in the West, modernism stands to be studied in this context through a cross-genre and multi-media lens that examines drawing, painting, and sculpture alongside performance, photography, and film, recognizing how distinctions between 'high' and 'popular' forms often blurred or were nonexistent.
3-5 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
This course surveys modern African art across the colonial, independence, and post-independence eras. Modern artistic practices developed in Sub-Saharan Africa as early as the 1920s and '30s among scattered independent practitioners, and in workshops run by colonial educators. Following World War II, a new generation of artists and critics rose to prominence in conjunction with the pan-Africanist Negritude movement. By the 1960s and '70s, modernist movements flourished in some African cities with support from new national governments, while socialist cultural policies often sought to modernize and nationalize local art practices, even as alarms began to sound over new patterns of authoritarianism, state collapse, and foreign intervention. Because classificatory orders in Africa were never so commanding as they tend to be in the West, modernism stands to be studied in this context through a cross-genre and multi-media lens that examines drawing, painting, and sculpture alongside performance, photography, and film, recognizing how distinctions between 'high' and 'popular' forms often blurred or were nonexistent.
Offered in Winter 2026 at Stanford University.