Folasade Ologundudu ruminates on her time at the Picasso Museum, reflecting on the problematic nature of presentation of African art as mere influences on Picasso, without acknowledging the African artists themselves, and critiques the telling of history, and the erasure of non-European narratives.
A warm sunny day in Paris, not quite spring, turned wet and grey in a matter of minutes as a passing shower swept through the Marais while on my way to the Picasso Museum. Entering the former mansion, a massive central staircase leading upstairs to The Collection: Revoir Picasso, showcasing the museum’s permanent collection of some five thousand objects, beckoned me. I entered a room highlighting Picasso’s African Period. Paintings lined the walls adjacent to West African masks, which wall texts described as being influential aspects of Picasso’s practice. Distinctly part of the whole, yet separate, they were an appendage of sorts. Notes along the margins of a page that had inspired a master artist, not the work of master artists that had inspired one another. What languages had they spoken? What histories did they hold? Who were the people who’d made these objects infused with cultural meaning, laden with African cosmology? Standing there, I came face to face with the hard truth. I would never know.
At the Picasso Museum in Paris, you will not find the name of a single African artist whose work adorns the museum’s walls. Rather, you will read about references to African sculpture. The names of the individuals whose work inspired the greatest shift in Picasso’s practice are lost to the pages of history.
I used to think that history was fixed, unchangeable. That the stories I read about the world were true. I have learned that that is, in fact, not the case. History had been written. And someone had to write it. History, like people, tells you what it wants you to believe. But who tells the story of our history? Why do some stories get passed down through generations, while others fade away into obscurity? Of all the things I saw that afternoon at the museum — some of Picasso’s most famous paintings, dozens of drawings and personal items from his studio — what has lingered in my mind ever since, what’s wormed itself far into the corners of my consciousness, is this very pressing question of history. Furrowing, insistent, the question returns again and again: who tells the story of our history?
Early on in life, I learned to take everything with a grain of salt, and when in doubt, to always seek a second opinion. I learned that Europeans had not spread civilisation to “primitive” Africans, as they would have me believe. I side-eyed their audacity. How tiresome was the same rhetoric again and again and again? For thousands of years before Europeans ever stepped foot on the continent of Africa, Africans built vast empires and great civilisations, expanding their territories with extensive trade routes. I learned that Africa was the site of immense milestones in human history and development; the first stone tools and earthenware, the first astronomical sites, and, notably, the world’s first works of art. Later, I learned that Picasso’s most important artworks — the ones credited for ushering in Cubism, for which he is known across the world to have fathered — were inspired by African artisans whose culture had reigned across and beyond the continent of Africa long before Picasso was born.
Who, then, is Picasso to an African who knows their history?
Standing in the museum, reflecting on the many stories I had been told, lies veiled as truths, I knew I would never look at Picasso the same. As people shuffled beside me and spoke in hushed tones so as not to disturb fellow museum goers, for a few moments I was no longer in the museum, or Paris for that matter. I was transported to some of the spaces I’ve been in the art world. From board meetings to art openings, to my travels to distant places, I recalled the experiences of often being one of just one or two people of colour in a room. At events highlighting Black artists, this is even more shocking and wildly prevalent.
As I exited the museum that afternoon, my feet splashing wet cobblestones along the way, I thought about the names of the people I would never know, the stories that would never be told, the history that had been erased. And while I knew nothing could replace what had been lost, I felt some semblance of recourse could be had. It would come in the form of a new storyteller, a new historian of sorts.
My time at the Picasso Museum left me with one thing I’ll share with you — a kind of PSA, if you will: tell your story, tell the story of your history, or someone else will. Here are six artists of the African diaspora I think you should know. They have defined and continue to expand the traditions of African sculpture while writing their own histories.
Romuald Hazoumè (b. 1962, Benin)
Romuald Hazoumè creates large-scale sculptures of discarded materials from industrial gas containers to fragmented electronic appliances. His most well-known work, La Bouche du Roi (1997–2005), is an assemblage of 304 masks made of bidons, whose title comes from an estuary in Benin where kidnapped Africans were once transported during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The monumental installation reflects not only colonialism and Africa’s past, but also the realities of African societies in the present day. With his distinct use of materiality, Hazoumè interprets the tenets of African sculpture through a contemporary lens. Unlike many African artists who left home seeking “greater opportunity” and have received widespread acclaim and blue-chip representation, the artist continues to live and work in Porto-Novo, Benin, where he was born. He is nonetheless represented by Gagosian and, in 2007, won the prestigious Arnold Bode Prize at documenta 12. Just last year, Hazoumè presented Ashé to the inaugural Republic of Benin pavilion at the Venice Biennale, entitled Everything Precious Is Fragile, as curated by Azu Nwabogu.
Magdalene Odundo (b. 1950, Kenya)
Kenyan-born Magdalene Odundo, revered as one of the foremost ceramicists working today, masterfully blends African traditions with a global mélange of cultural influences. Integrating the ceremonial legacies of pottery with aesthetic interventions of ancient Greece, Japan, and more, she hand-builds pieces that resonate with both cultural relevance and sculptural grandeur. On a return trip to Africa from the UK in the 1970s, when many African nations were experiencing post-colonial independence, Odundo visited Nigeria and Kenya, deepening her relationship with clay. This period marked a shift in her artistic practice from which all her ensuing work stems. After garnering critical acclaim and working as an educator for nearly forty years at theCommonwealth Institute, the Royal College of Art, and the University for the Creative Arts in Surrey, where she lives, Odundo’s captivating vessels broke the auction record for a living ceramist in 2020 when her Angled Mixed Coloured Piece (1988) sold for £200,000.
Zizipho Poswa (b. 1979, South Africa)
Zizipho Poswa does more than create monumental sculptures; she provides visual testimony for the spiritual traditions, diverse African belief systems, and matriarchal stewardship of her South African Xhosa culture. Some works tower over eight feet tall and feature colossal reproductions of hair accessories and metal jewellery worn by the Lobi women of West Africa. At that scale, they command any space they inhabit. Poswa is represented by the powerhouse Southern Guild, which expanded to Los Angeles last year and opened with an inaugural pair of exhibitions, including her solo, Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty). From Cape Town, where she lives and works, Poswa hand-builds sculptural pieces that honour African mysticism, rituals, and religion while bringing the legacy of ceramics and African pottery to new heights.
Leilah Babirye (b. 1985, Uganda)
Disowned by her father and exiled from Uganda, Leilah Babirye works at the edge of traditional African sculpture to celebrate the queer community. Babirye carves, welds, burns, and burnishes monumental figureheads and masks out of wood, expanding historical African woodcarving techniques. Scouring junkyards across New York City, where she is based, Babirye sources objects and materials rendered as trash, repurposing and reinventing them into majestic sculptures imbued with visceral emotion. Rubber tyres become headdresses for totemic busts; metal wireframes, intricately fashioned, become decorative jewellery. Some sculptures are massive, standing over eleven feet high. Last year, her first solo museum exhibition opened at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, engaging the storied institution’s permanent African collection with her contemporary works.
Dina Nur Satti (b. 1987, Chad)
Dina Nur Satti unearths spiritual practice as she moulds clay. The burgeoning ceramist explores the resonance of pre-colonial African societies using ancient pottery coiling techniques, a practice that dates back over 10,000 years. Born in Chad to a Sudanese father and Somali mother, Satti honours her cultural heritage through an extensive research-based practice, drawing on her ancestral roots of the Nubian people in Aswan and Dongola who lived along the Nile. For Satti, earthenware becomes a site of memory and remembering, of spirituality and rebirth. Her minimalist vessels, voluptuous yet slender in their feminine-like shapes, pay homage to the many ceremonial uses of clay across the African continent. Having completed residences at cult-favourites, such as Solange Knowles’ Saint Heron and Palm Heights in the Cayman Islands, Satti’s work has been exhibited from the Triennale Milano to Efie Gallery, Dubai.
Ben Enwonwu (1917–1994, Nigeria)
Remembered as one of Africa’s most important artists of the twentieth century, Ben Enwonwu’s talents were nurtured early in life by his father, an Igbo sculptor. Pushing past limits, he became the first African to graduate from the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, the first professor of Fine Arts at the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, and an art consultant for FESTAC, the landmark 1977 Pan-African festival held in Lagos, Nigeria. To date, it is the largest Pan-African convention in the world. Trained in European artistic traditions in colonial Nigeria, Enwonwu’s five-decade career is marked by a celebration of African culture and his Igbo heritage, an abhorrence of colonialism, and a commitment to the Negritude movement. One of his most famous works — a bronze sculpture of a female figure, titled Anyanwu, which symbolises the powerful earth goddess Ani — stands in front of the Nigeria National Museum in Lagos, where it has remained since being commissioned to mark the museum’s opening in 1956.
