The Money Is the Wrong Shape
The year Beyoncé wore her clothes, Sarah Diouf was still, in effect, her own bank. Building the label meant buying fabric before the money came back and paying tailors before the invoices settled, then finding cash for the samples, the shoots, the customs paperwork and the long quiet months between one burst of global attention […]
The Index Is the Institution
Ask a machine where to find African design and it will answer without hesitation. It returns names, a few studios, an archive or two, a marketplace. The answer arrives as though it were a window onto everything that exists. It is closer to a door that someone else hung, opening onto the rooms they chose […]
Aṣọ-Òkè: The Cloth We Inherit
I am standing before a portrait in Nigerian Modernism, the survey at Tate Modern. It is Akinola Lasekan’s 1957 oil of Justus D. Akeredolu. Lasekan and Akeredolu were both first-generation Nigerian modernists who once shared a studio in Lagos, and Akeredolu is remembered as the pioneer of Yoruba thorn carving, so the painter here is […]
Marriage Was Always the Plan for These African Men. Until It Wasn’t
The average African man is often assumed to want marriage, or at least that is the expectation many grow up with. For centuries, marriage has been positioned as one of adulthood’s defining milestones, a marker of success and fulfillment against which many men are quietly measured. In many communities, that expectation begins early. Almost as […]
What the Closure of Tiwani Contemporary Reveals About the African Art Market
Tiwani Contemporary has closed after fifteen years operating between London and Lagos, marking the loss of one of the most influential mid-sized galleries working between Africa and the global art market. Founded in 2011 by Maria Varnava under the mentorship of the late Nigerian curator Bisi Silva, who proposed the name — loosely translating to […]
The Machine Can See You. It Still Can’t Pay You.
Somewhere in a court-approved spreadsheet, nearly half a million books have become line items. Whatever a book once was in the making of it, the years of revision and abandonment and recovery before it ever reached a reader, it now exists in that file as an eligible work with a claim status, a payout estimate, […]
After the Applause: Heritage Textiles and the Economics of the Runway Moment
Florentina Agu went back to the wood carving workshops she had visited as a child, and many of the artisans her family had once worked with were dead. The ones still alive were in difficult circumstances. Agu’s father had run a wood carving studio in Nigeria that produced parquet flooring and carved objects for sale […]
Nigerian Women Are Dressing Against the Code
Two decades ago, Y2K marked one of the most expressive moments in Nigerian fashion, shaped by the rise of internet culture and the influence of Nollywood. Visibility, then, felt intentional and confident rather than excessive. A version of that sensibility has returned, carried by a generation that dresses for how it wants to feel rather […]
The Labour of Rivers.
The Labour of Rivers is an ongoing series about the fishermen who work the Andoni River in Rivers State, Nigeria. For the men photographed here, the river is both workplace and inheritance — a rhythm of mornings out on the water, long hours of patience, and the slow return to shore. The series moves through […]
Sanjo Lawal: Artsman the Traveler
Sanjo Lawal works between photography, creative editing, and digital painting. He renders skin in near-charcoal tones so the colors around it can sing harder. Born in Lagos in 1997 and raised in Ijebu Ode, he draws on Yoruba ceremony, the Ojude Oba festival, and the layered textiles of his mother’s wardrobe. His Artsman the Traveler […]