Young African Photographers Are Looking Back
In 2024, a Nigerian hit found a second life on social media. “Who Get Dat Thing (Remix),” by Dekumzy featuring Slow Dog and Stormrex, began circulating after a group of young Nigerian women recreated the choreography to Stormrex’s verse, dressed in the exaggerated glamour of the late 1990s and early 2000s: fitted tops, low-rise bottoms, […]
What Beadwork Is Worth
It took Noormesuku Kereto more than two months to finish the necklace. It was an Enkarewa, the wide beaded collar a Maasai woman wears at her wedding, and this one was made for a safari camp in the Mara rather than for a bride, which changes who will look at it but not how it […]
Adirẹ and the Wrapper-Wearers
My relationship to adirẹ is perhaps an unusual one; it begins not with indigo, but with cassava. In 2024, I returned to Nigeria for a two-month residency with the G.A.S. Foundation to study cassava’s role and cultural significance in the country. It was the longest I had spent in the country since leaving at five […]
In Mwangola, Gelmira Gourgel Exhibits the Music That Fueled Angola’s Independence
Gelmira Gourgel, an Angolan architectural designer and curator, wants people to see Angola in all its depth, not as the country that rarely enters conversations about Africa, but as a nation whose rich cultural traditions, enduring craftsmanship and creative resilience have long shaped the continent’s artistic imagination. In her own words, it is a politically […]
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 […]