African Art Doesn’t Need the White Cube

It is a heavily trafficked Friday in the middle of July, and the roads leading to Windsor Gallery are at a standstill. An hour later, a crowd of well-dressed guests makes its way into the gallery for the opening of Uthman Wahaab’s solo exhibition, Alas, We Meet Again. For those familiar with Wahaab’s work, something about this exhibition feels different.

Wahaab is known for his veneration of voluptuous women, a recurring subject through which he challenges the societal and physical stereotypes imposed on their bodies. As with his previous exhibitions, there is a clear rejection of the white cube, a gallery style defined by plain, unadorned white walls. Yet this time, the focus shifts from the rejection itself to what the space does to the visceral quality of his work.

On the ground floor, a brutalist wall painting sets the tone, while upstairs, the walls are dusted in pine green and pomegranate red. In the green room, artificial grass covers the floor and a picnic basket sits on a checked cloth, beneath paintings of women outdoors. In the red room, a clawfoot bathtub stands under gold pendant lights. The colours feel deliberate, almost an extension of the paintings themselves, but they ask a broader question about what happens when African art is freed from the sterility of the white cube, and how much more visceral an encounter with the work can become when the space around it participates in the experience.

The exhibition recalls Wahaab’s presentation of Where Is Chi Chi? with Oda Art Gallery at Art X Lagos in 2023. Housed in a charming red booth, the work stood out as one of the fair’s most striking presentations that year.

There is perhaps a quiet renaissance happening in contemporary African art, one that rejects the white cube. Artists and galleries are finding other ways to escape conventional white walls. In a 2017 Mail & Guardian interview with the artists behind Danger Gevaar Ingozi Studio, Chad Cordeiro, Sbongiseni Khulu and Nathaniel Sheppard III discussed their rejection of the conventional gallery environment. Cordeiro described the problem as the “layers behind the white walls”, arguing that power, exclusion and extraction are what matter. Sheppard described the white cube as making an attempt to appear “void of all culture and influence”, while arguing that behind the white walls are histories of privilege. Yet he was also clear that the studio would welcome a show with a white-cube gallery; the point was not to depend on one for cultural capital.

This phenomenon can be seen across some of the continent’s major institutions and exhibitions: the scattered tiling of the walls at Nahous Lagos, the wooden-framed surfaces of the 2024 Lagos Biennial, the varied colours of Art X Lagos’ booths at every edition, the Dakar Biennale’s love affair with jungle green, and the abandoned, unfinished building in Grand-Popo, Benin Republic, filled with photographs.

Before the white cube became the default backdrop for displaying art, artworks were shown in a variety of spaces. In 14th- and 15th-century Europe, they appeared in cathedrals, wealthy private homes and publicly commissioned civic spaces. By the 18th century, artworks had moved into the crowded salons of European academies, where paintings were hung tightly together, from floor to ceiling.

So little wall was left that no backdrop was needed, and where it did show, it was covered in textile or patterned wallpaper. But the art world has always been a cauldron of shifting ideas and movements. The 20th-century rise of modernist ideas sought to place art back into a pantheon of refined taste and intellectual pedigree, rejecting ornamentation and artistic excess.

The Museum of Modern Art, founded in New York in 1929, was already experimenting with the white cube layout when the Second World War devastated Europe, toppling Paris as the capital of the art world. Artists and dealers flocked to New York to restart their careers. Back in Europe, the aesthetic of the white cube was embraced in postwar art rebuilding efforts.

White backgrounds make artworks easier to see: they reflect most of the light that hits them rather than absorbing it, so paintings register as brighter. However, almost nothing in the art world is innocent. As the critic Brian O’Doherty argued in Inside the White Cube, his 1976 essays on the ideology of the gallery space, the adoption of the white cube wasn’t all about colour: it was about turning artworks into isolated, autonomous commodities.

It was about separating the artwork from the messy studio of the artist, from chaotic environments, from windows and clocks and all distractions. It was about removing it from all contexts. Ultimately, it was about training the eye to see the gallery as a controlled place of commerce. A shop, even. The white cube wasn’t just an isolated event within gallery-exhibition architecture, but a broader consequence of European intellectual thought.

But African art has rarely been minimalist. Not necessarily maximalist in the contemporary sense of excess for excess’s sake, but in its relationship to colour, material, movement, sound, pattern, ornament and the human body. A mask, for instance, is rarely simply a mask. It can become part of a larger performance involving costume, dance, music, movement and the transformation of the person wearing it.

This matters because the history of the white cube is almost the opposite story. The white cube asks the artwork to stand alone. It removes visual noise. It separates the object from its surroundings. It creates distance between the viewer and the work.

And African art has long existed within a contradiction it didn’t create. Even before the modernist rollout of the white cube, African art was being taken by force, ending up in the private collections and personal museums of European visitors during the colonial era.

There’s something bittersweet to acknowledge here: that while African art was plundered, resold and flattened out of the history and people it came from, it somehow survived. African art, as originally produced within communal and spiritual realities, now bears complex histories and interactions with external agents that are alien to it, even responsible for its removal. The tensions couldn’t be more obvious. Looking at the Benin Bronzes in a German museum can be jarring, even painful, but it’s also a reminder that history can be co-produced, and that African art can hold multiple meanings or narratives across time.

To the Oba in 16th-century Benin, the Benin Bronzes served as sacred court and ritual objects. In the hands of British soldiers, they were trophies of civilisation. They meant something to German curators, who studied, categorised and preserved them in their museums. For modern visitors, they could mean something else entirely. However, the presence of African art in Western collections, or within the geometry of the white cube, doesn’t mean that all stakeholders arrive at its contradictions or tensions with an equal distribution of power. African art can be historically complex and symbolically sophisticated, but that doesn’t mean all encounters with it are the same.

The struggle for greater representation for African artists is ongoing, with concerns around collections, acquisitions, biennales, museums, curatorial visibility and the international art market. But representation isn’t solely about numbers; it is also about how visual systems recognise and approve of shared conventions. An African artist enters a commercial African gallery, the gallery enters the global art system, and the artworks and the gallery are judged through an established visual style.

This isn’t a binary of the white cube being “right” or “wrong”. Nor is it that African galleries are simply “copying” Western exhibition models. And leaving the white walls does not mean leaving the market. A room with a bathtub and armchairs can just as easily show a collector how a painting might look at home. Given the complex lineage of African art, some African artists and galleries may be using the white cube to rewrite African art into the canon of “modern” or “high art”, after it was classified out of the category by Western institutions.

To imagine alternative spaces for African galleries shouldn’t mean abandoning modernism. Nor should it mean creating moral hierarchies over which African gallery looks “African” enough. For galleries, there’s certainly a place for aesthetic intention, for deciding how to organise attention within exhibitions.

As with Uthman Wahaab’s exhibition in July, Windsor Gallery has, for some exhibitions, abandoned white walls for colours such as pink, green and blue. Rather than another sterile container, the Nubuke Foundation in East Legon, Accra, Ghana, uses raw concrete, with louvre windows that offer glimpses of nearby palm trees and gardens.

In Cape Town, South Africa, Zeitz MOCAA (Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa) took a different route, carving a soaring atrium out of the concrete tubes of a former grain silo while keeping white-cube galleries around it.

Depending on the goal, exhibitions can take place in a courtyard, compound, palace, marketplace, town hall or community gathering place. The fixation on what an African gallery should look like risks producing stereotypes. So the question isn’t merely whether African art can exist outside the white cube, because it can, but what other spatial experiences are out there to explore.