North African Design and Its Geographies
Above: ALTIN, Our AlUla Trilogy, Wadi. Photograph © Lorenzo Arrigoni The Institut du monde arabe has named twenty-six finalists for the fourth edition of its Design Award, across four juried categories, showing at the IMA from 10 to 20 September with the ceremony held the evening before. A Public Prize, new this year, runs across […]
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 […]
If This Then That: Sculpture — John Chamberlain → Gonçalo Mabunda
If you understand why John Chamberlain’s crushed cars matter, you’ll recognize what Gonçalo Mabunda built from the weapons of a war. IF YOU LIKE JOHN CHAMBERLAIN John Chamberlain transformed crushed automobiles into sculpture, showing that industrial scrap could carry the same expressive force as bronze or marble. Rather than erase the material’s past, he preserved […]
NAANIYA: The New Language of Modest Fashion
Fashion entered Madina Tangara’s life long before NAANIYA existed. Her father was a sapeur, a man who understood the quiet power of dressing with intention, and her mother carried an effortless elegance and a deep appreciation for style. “I understood early on that clothing could carry meaning beyond appearance,” she says. That conviction became the […]
Diarra Bousso Builds Fashion From Mathematics, Technology, and Craft
Diarra Bousso’s first breakthrough arrived disguised as a mistake. It came not in an atelier or a studio but late one night in a classroom at Stanford University. Stacks of algebra assignments covered the desk in front of her. She was grading papers, tracing her students’ attempts to graph linear equations, absolute values, and quadratic […]
Meriem Berrada Took Morocco to Venice for the First Time
For about a decade and a half, Meriem Berrada has been at the forefront of building sustainable art and cultural ecosystems across Africa and the Arab world and their diasporas, with a focus on the intersections between art and craft in contemporary storytelling, as well as an interest in photography. She has founded, launched, and […]
Inside the Most Compelling African Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale
For a long time, Africa’s presence at the Venice Biennale has felt slightly out of place. Even as African artists helped shape contemporary art globally, the continent itself often seemed pushed to the margins, present but not always fully seen, its stories and forms framed through a Western lens or treated as something separate from […]
How Dakar Moves
The Ancien Palais de Justice has no business being as beautiful as it is. It is an abandoned colonial courthouse out on Cap Manuel, the sea right behind it, the concrete going soft at the corners, the kind of building the city has been meaning to deal with for as long as I have been […]
Kente and the Politics of Being Read
On June 8, 2020, a group of Democratic lawmakers knelt on the floor of the United States Capitol for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the duration then believed to mark how long a Minneapolis officer had knelt on George Floyd’s neck, later revised at trial to nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Several of them wore […]