Highlights of the month
A selection of this month’s stories, articles, events, and news about African Contemporary Art that you can’t miss.
Highlighted Interview
WAAU Events:
1-54 Marrakech returns in February 2026, bringing contemporary African and diasporic art into dialogue with the city once again.
WAAU Events:
Du 24 janvier au 7 mars 2026, la Galerie CHRISTOPHE PERSON - BRUXELLES présente « Crocodiles - Spiritualité, rites et survie à l’ère de l’Anthropocène », une exposition qui met en lumière quatre artistes originaires d’Afrique Centrale et de l’Ouest qui représentent cette figure emblématique à travers leurs pratiques singulières, mêlant mémoire, spiritualité et engagement écologique.
WAAU Events:
We are proud to open our 2026 program with a powerful and necessary exhibition by artist Justin Ebanda. The Other’s Share – Humanity and Collective Memory is a visual prose of Cameroonian history.
WAAU Events:
Norval Foundation presents Brett Murray: Wild Life, a major solo exhibition by one of South Africa’s most acclaimed artists. Curated by Karel Nel, the exhibition opens on 6 December 2025 and brings together more than eighty sculptures spanning four decades of Murray’s celebrated and sometimes controversial career.
WAAU Events:
In this new series, Aïda Muluneh pushes her inquiry into the meaning of the image in the twenty-first century even further. What message can one carry today? Is art a space for societal debate and conflict resolution? We are not speaking here of global conflicts, which fall under the responsibility of others, but of the inner conflicts that punctuate our daily lives like Socratic enigmas—inviting us to reconsider certain realities.
WAAU Events:
Goodman Gallery is delighted to present Dynamic Equilibrium, Atta Kwami’s second solo exhibition with the gallery since announcing representation of the estate in partnership with Beardsmore Gallery.
WAAU Events:
Portal do Retorno (Portal of Return) is Dino D’Santiago’s first solo exhibition. Conceived as a visual ceremony of spiritual reparation, it draws on the memory of the transatlantic slave trade and the millions of African lives that were interrupted, erased, and denied ritual, mourning, and historical recognition.
WAAU Events:
Cette année 2026 s’ouvre avec une exposition de l’artiste martiniquais Alain Joséphine, dont j’ai découvert le travail il y a deux ans lors du salon AKAA, peinture pour laquelle j’ai eu un véritable coup de cœur.
WAAU Events:
If there’s any remaining doubt about technology’s value in art, let 28-year-old creator Osean be the one to dispel it. The Atlanta-based multihyphenate is a 3D artist, musician and visual collaborator who’s worked with the likes of Playboi Carti, Doechii, and Offset.
WAAU Events:
Scheduled to open in 2026, the Obama Presidential Museum will tell the story of President and Mrs. Obama and their historic presidency—and how we can all do our part to create change.
WAAU Events:
WORLDART is pleased to present Let me tell you something, a solo exhibition by Dion Cupido that will run from 8 - 29 January 2026.
WAAU Events:
At the origin of this exhibition lies a childhood gesture: walking. Walking to understand, walking to know where the earth ends and where the sky begins. Inspired by the artist’s autobiographical film Petit Berger (Little Shepherd), the exhibition offers this intimate narrative as a key to reading the universe of Saïdou Dicko.
WAAU Events:
Each year, the Platform section at London Art Fair invites an exclusive selection of galleries to present work by well-known, overlooked and emerging artists all aligned to a single distinct theme chosen by a guest curator.
WAAU Events:
October Gallery presents an exhibition which brings together the work of Susanne Kessler, Elisabeth Lalouschek, Theresa Weber, Eleanor Lakelin, Junko Mori, Bev Butkow, Golnaz Fathi, Tian Wei, El Anatsui and Gerald Wilde amongst others. Lineages explores the employment of line within these artists’ practice, in which the notion of line is not confined to the drawn mark, but emerges as a connective thread in concept and form.
WAAU Events:
Fondation H presents Correspondances, a solo exhibition by Roméo Mivekannin, on view from October 24, 2025, to March 21, 2026. The French-Beninese artist, invited to create an exhibition in dialogue with Malagasy history, territory, and culture, explores historical narratives, colonial representations, and spiritual transmissions within the local context. The exhibition will occupy Fondation H’s upper floor for five months, in Antananarivo, Madagascar.
WAAU Events:
In the quiet of morning, light filters through the high windows of El Anatsui's Nsukka studio. It is the same studio he has worked in for decades. There, discarded materials gather in restless, shimmering heaps. Among them are the thousands of liquor bottle caps that have become synonymous with his work, collected from local distilleries and sorted, flattened or twisted in preparation for transformation.
WAAU Events:
Claire Oliver Gallery is pleased to announce Certain Restrictions Do Apply, a landmark two-person textile exhibition featuring new works by artists Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan. On view from January 9–March 7, 2026, the exhibition presents 9 new artworks and inaugurates the gallery’s 2026 program.
WAAU Events:
The mid-career survey Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe will present nearly a decade of work across disciplines and will provide an overview of the threads in Jackson’s practice and her varied use of materials.
WAAU Events:
Painting in the Exercise of Art is a two-part group exhibition curated by Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, opening at the gallery’s Marrakech space on 27 December 2025. Developed in two chapters, the exhibition examines what painting becomes when it pushes beyond its traditional boundaries - materially, spatially, and conceptually.
WAAU Events:
Garden of Blue Whispers marks a period of flourishing for Ugandan artist Stacey Gillian Abe, a new chapter in a journey that began with Shrublet of Old Ayivu, the artist’s first solo exhibition with Unit.
WAAU Events:
Albertz Benda is pleased to present Phenomenal, the second New York exhibition by Larissa de Souza (b. 1995, São Paulo), featuring a new group of paintings that draw on the devices of stagecraft—sleight of hand, misdirection, disappearance, reveal — as a metaphor for femininity, transformation, and self-possession.
WAAU Events:
Dumalitshona is a forth-coming solo exhibition by ceramic artist Madoda Fani. This new body of work draws from indigenous knowledge systems as well as Fani's own introspective practice.
WAAU Features:
Gihanga Institute of Contemporary Art is a non-profit centre for the arts that is home to a library, exhibitions, platforms for performance, a screening room, studio, and art residency.
Highlighted event
Du 24 janvier au 7 mars 2026, la Galerie CHRISTOPHE PERSON - BRUXELLES présente « Crocodiles - Spiritualité, rites et survie à l’ère de l’Anthropocène », une exposition qui met en lumière quatre artistes originaires d’Afrique Centrale et de l’Ouest qui représentent cette figure emblématique à travers leurs pratiques singulières, mêlant mémoire, spiritualité et engagement écologique.
Highlight interview
If there’s any remaining doubt about technology’s value in art, let 28-year-old creator Osean be the one to dispel it. The Atlanta-based multihyphenate is a 3D artist, musician and visual collaborator who’s worked with the likes of Playboi Carti, Doechii, and Offset.
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