Over the past decade, the market for modern and contemporary African art has undergone a remarkable transformation. Auction records have multiplied, international museums have expanded their acquisitions, and African artists have gained unprecedented visibility on the global stage. Yet behind the headlines lie more fundamental questions: How is value actually created? Who shapes an artist’s reputation? And what will it take for African art to achieve lasting institutional recognition rather than simply moments of market enthusiasm?
Few people have witnessed, and helped shape, this evolution as closely as Hannah O’Leary. After helping pioneer Bonhams’ Modern & Contemporary African Art auctions, she joined Sotheby’s in 2016 to establish the auction house’s first dedicated Modern & Contemporary African Art department. Over the next decade, she helped bring hundreds of artists to auction, set more than 200 auction records, and advised private collectors and museums before launching her own advisory firm specialising in modern and contemporary African art, while continuing to serve as Sotheby’s consultant for Africa.
In this conversation with DakArtNews, O’Leary reflects on the forces shaping today’s market: from valuation methodologies and collector behaviour to the paradox surrounding women artists, the role of African art fairs, and the future of twentieth-century African masters. Throughout the interview, she argues that building a sustainable market requires far more than rising prices: it depends on scholarship, institutions, patronage, and the long-term work of securing African art’s place within global art history.
How would you describe the current state of the contemporary African art market?
I’ve been working in this market for more than twenty years, and I’d say that up until about 2020, growth was slow and steady, then everything changed. A big part of it was COVID: we were all stuck at home, we couldn’t visit galleries or attend auctions in person, but we were online, and we could buy art online. 2020 to 2022 were absolute boom years, not just for African contemporary art, but for the entire art market.
That was also fuelled by the immediate reaction to the death of George Floyd, which I don’t think you can ignore when talking about our market. There was a strong drive by collectors and institutions to look at Black art and artists, and at parts of the world and parts of the canon that had been ignored. So we saw a huge uptick in sales during those years. 2020 to 2022 were boom years. And we’ve seen a decrease since then.
You can’t talk about the African art market in isolation. You always have to consider the broader global art market, and within that, as with stocks and shares, emerging markets tend to be a little more delicate, a little more sensitive to fluctuations than other parts of the market. So there have been two things going on: the evolution of the African market itself, and the fluctuations of the global market, from which the African market can’t be immune.
The last three years, the international contemporary market has been tricky. There are headlines every day, galleries going out of business, galleries downsizing. Africa isn’t immune to that. We’ve sadly had a couple of galleries that represent African artists follow suit. We’ve had artists dropped by their galleries. That’s part of a larger international economic situation.
I’d say, however, that it’s not all negative. After those boom years, when people were rushing to buy African art and art from the diaspora, I think that’s grown into something more mature now. We have collectors who, at the time, weren’t so familiar or fluent in African art, and who are now, two, three, four years later, collecting more consistently, more intelligently. They’re really following this market and building significant collections.
I do think, though, that some international collectors and institutions are now taking Africa much more seriously, and it’s become part of their programming in a way that used to feel novel, unknown, or in need of fixing. I think these artists, and Africa, are now part of that international discourse permanently.
There was a moment where Africa was front and centre — if you looked at any contemporary art auction in the early 2020s, it was dominated by artists from Africa and the diaspora. That’s not the case now, but I think they’re more consistently included and represented in that global discussion.
The boom years was the period dominated by Black Portraiture. What does that tell us about the market?
If you look back just ten or twenty years, you can see how underrepresented African diaspora Black art was worldwide, still grossly underrepresented. There had to be a catalyst that accelerated that market growth, and that was it. It was a whole perfect storm, that situation, but also the global lockdown. It was a very unique time.
You’re right that a very specific type of African art was being collected then, Black figurative painting, by and large. Now the market is starting to move away from that demand, as the contemporary art market always does. There’s always the new thing, always what everyone’s looking for, everyone’s trying to stay ahead of the curve. But certainly we saw a huge demand for figurative painting first, and that demand has subsided and moved on to other artists, other aesthetics.
That doesn’t mean Africa gets written out of the conversation. African art is so much more than Black figurative painting. Abstraction was, in fact, invented in Africa. There’s a huge number of abstract artists making amazing work who need to be considered and collected, or artists working in other media besides painting.
You’ll always have people collecting in the figurative category, always have excellent artists making great work in it. Most of the collectors I work with aren’t always chasing the next hot thing, they’re always going to buy the best of the best, whatever that looks like.
Do you think the market for contemporary African art has reached a new level of maturity, or are we in a phase of consolidation?
We’ve come a long way, and we have a huge way to go. This is a really interesting point at which to reflect. A lot of collectors and artists who have been active in this field for the last ten years only saw growth until quite recently, and there’s been a bit of a wobble in the market. I’ve been in the art market a long time, you see dips and peaks and troughs. So sometimes we have these corrections, which aren’t necessarily worrying, but until now we’d had very steady growth.
These last couple of years have been the first time we’ve witnessed anything other than that. A lot of people are learning that you have to be dynamic, careful in what you’re collecting, who you’re promoting, and how you’re playing the art market game.
Whether we’ve come to maturity, I think we’re far from it. The one statistic I always come back to is that almost one in five people on the planet lives in Africa. Now, is one in five dollars spent in the contemporary art market by an African artist? No, it’s 0.1% of the global contemporary art market. We’re a long way from parity, a long way from full representation.
Not only are the artists talented, and the talent on the continent is exponential compared to what we’re seeing right now, but the collecting power of the continent too. So who is collecting those artists, whether they’re African, diaspora, or great art lovers generally, there’s so much potential in that market that we haven’t begun to realise. If you look at any section of the ecosystem, auction houses, galleries, art fairs, compared to the non-African outlets of those same categories, it’s a drop in the ocean. We have a huge amount of foundation-building to do before this market comes to maturity.
That gap between talent and infrastructure is precisely what recent market commentary has pointed to. ArtTactic recently suggested that demand is no longer the main constraint, and that the real challenge now is building the infrastructure to support collectors. What do you think?
We’ve had a market that has grown quite fast, and then we haven’t necessarily got the foundation on the continent to support that. So when I think of this ecosystem, I think of opportunities for artists to make work, to make a living, to have their work seen by collectors, both domestically and internationally. And that means that we need art schools, museums, art galleries, art fairs, archives and artists residencies, and all of these things that we often take for granted if you live in Europe or America. And even in those places, those things are often underfunded.
And not only that, not only do we need the vision and the people to create these platforms, we need the money to make them sustainable, and we need the professionals as well. So you have now got a whole continent, a vast area geographically and population-wise.
We need experienced professionals to run this ecosystem. And this is a market that wasn’t really a viable career choice for many young people, artists or art professionals, a decade or two ago. So there’s a huge amount of catching up to do and training to be done. It’s a mountain that needs to be climbed.
Who are today’s collectors of modern and contemporary African art?
People are often surprised when I say that the collectors I work with are primarily African themselves. When Sotheby’s entered the market, many expected that we were mainly selling African art to Western European and American buyers. But that was not the case. My career has always been Africa-focused and African collector-focused.
Typically, in a Sotheby’s auction of African art, about one third of the bidders were from the African continent, but two thirds of the actual buyers were from Africa. African collectors were the ones who knew the material best, bid the hardest, and paid the highest prices. This is very encouraging. While I want the entire world to appreciate African art, at this stage of market development, African collectors are the ones who truly understand and value their own artists.
A typical auction might have 200 registered bidders from many different countries. But when you look at the list of winning bidders, the majority were African-born private collectors, along with some museums. For 20th-century African art (modern African art), African collectors were the primary buyers.
For younger, 21st-century contemporary artists, we saw a greater international spread, which is not surprising because those artists are often represented by international galleries and shown at major international fairs. It is easier for collectors to enter the market through contemporary art than through deep historical material.
And where are those collectors mainly based in Africa?
The biggest collector bases are in South Africa and Nigeria. That is not surprising, they are two of the largest economies and art markets on the continent. They are also where you see the strongest international promotion of artists. However, collectors from these countries are buying across the continent, not just their own national artists, which is very encouraging.
Morocco and Egypt also have significant collector bases. There are smaller pockets of collectors in many other countries. I am always surprised by where the collectors I speak with are from. There is still so much untapped potential.
What are the main challenges when dealing with works by African artists? Is it provenance, condition, authentication, or something else?
This is where my classical art historical training comes in. As with every market, there are issues with fakes and forgeries, as well as title and legal claims. Everything I do, and everything Sotheby’s does, involves months of research to ensure that what is offered is exactly what we say it is. This exists in every market where money is involved. It is challenging, but also quite satisfying. The research is my favourite part of the job, not only verifying the work, but conducting primary research.
For African art in particular, much of this research falls to auction houses and market professionals because there are relatively few catalogue raisonnés, monographs, or well-documented exhibition histories. I would love to see more academics working in the field and more publications. Research, publications, and archiving are hugely important. This comes back to our earlier conversation about building a fully populated ecosystem with professionals in every area.
That question of building infrastructure from scratch brings us to your own experience doing exactly that at Sotheby’s. You founded and led Sotheby’s first Modern & Contemporary African Art department in 2016. What did it mean, for you and for the market, to build such a department from the ground up?
It was incredibly exciting. I had actually done something very similar at Bonhams, where I’d worked from 2006 to 2016. Together with my colleague Giles Peppiatt, we built the auction house’s Modern and Contemporary African Art sales, which were the first regular auctions dedicated to the field.
So when Sotheby’s approached me in 2016 and asked me to build their Modern & Contemporary African Art department, I was thrilled. Not just because it was Sotheby’s, but because I understood what their entry into the market would mean. It sent a very strong signal of confidence. Collectors who perhaps hadn’t been paying much attention before suddenly started looking at the category in a different way.
Sotheby’s had played that role before with Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American art, so I knew the potential was enormous.
Being able to shape the department was incredibly rewarding. We led the market for ten years, carried out important research, rediscovered works that had been overlooked, placed major pieces in museum collections, and helped bring greater international attention to modern and contemporary African art. I’m very proud of what we achieved.
In 2016, you described the market as having “enormous untapped potential.” Nearly a decade later, how much of that potential do you think has actually been realized?
A great deal of it has been realised. At Sotheby’s, our annual sales turnover was growing by anywhere between 10 and 50 percent year after year, which was remarkable compared to most other categories. We were also seeing a significant number of new buyers entering the market with every sale. I’m very proud of the growth we’ve witnessed, although I still believe there is much more work to do.
One of the strongest signals of that evolution was Sotheby’s decision, in 2025, to integrate African artists into its broader contemporary sales. How did you interpret that shift?
In 2016, we had a discussion about whether we should have a separate African Art department and dedicated auctions, or whether African artists should simply be included in our contemporary sales. At that point, we felt the category would benefit from having its own platform.
After ten years, however, we felt we had brought the market into the mainstream. These artists were now recognised by the international market, and it seemed the right moment to present them alongside their international peers in our contemporary auctions. To me, that is a sign of the market’s maturity.
When I joined Sotheby’s, there were about five African artists regularly included in our international contemporary sales, and three of them were based in the diaspora. Only William Kentridge and El Anatsui were living on the continent.
Through the work we did in the Modern & Contemporary African Art department, we introduced many more artists into the international auction market, established stronger and stronger prices, and gradually fed those artists into our international sales.
Not everyone, however, sees that integration as an unambiguous win. Some observers have argued that a dedicated department develops long-term relationships with estates, collectors, galleries and scholars. They worry that this accumulated expertise may become diluted once the category disappears institutionally. How would you respond to that concern?
It’s a good question. We had that conversation over the years—the pros and cons of having a separate category versus presenting these artists alongside their international peers. In the end, I think the latter is the right way forward.
Speaking for Sotheby’s, the company takes great pride in ensuring that everything it brings to market is treated with the same level of importance. If a great work from Africa comes up for sale, it should receive the same research, platform and visibility in a global contemporary sale as it would in a dedicated African art sale. In fact, it benefits from reaching a much wider audience. Our African art auctions would typically attract around 200 registered bidders; you can probably multiply that by ten for an international contemporary sale. So, for me, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
That said, it does mean there are fewer works entering those international sales, because the threshold is much higher than it was in the specialist auctions. But that also means they are presenting the strongest and most significant works, which helps the market continue to grow.
Let’s turn from institutional strategy to a more fundamental question: how is an artwork actually valued? You’ve conducted several valuation tours across Africa. When you assess the value of an artwork, what are the key factors you look at?
I’ll start with how an auctioneer, or somebody working for an auction house, traditionally does a valuation. It’s very simple: we look at previous auction results by that artist. We have access to databases, so if an artist has come up at auction before, especially if they’re well established, we can compare the work we’re looking at with previous results. That’s the most straightforward way to provide a valuation.
During my time at Sotheby’s, and still today, I felt that because this is still a growing category, that you have the opportunity to look at other factors especially if an artist has not been selling at auction, because if an artist hasn’t been selling at auction, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not good, they’re not important, they’re not worth collecting.
I think there’s a real opportunity when an artist hasn’t appeared at auction before. Particularly with younger contemporary artists, it may simply mean that their market is being so well looked afetr by the artist and their gallery that works are not being resold. They’re going into museum collections or long-term private collections. People aren’t buying them to make a quick investment—they’re buying them to keep. That’s why you don’t necessarily see those works coming onto the secondary market.
A huge part of my job is understanding the primary market: knowing the artists, their galleries, the collectors, what prices are being paid, how much demand there is, and even how easy it is to access the work.
Can you give us a concrete example of that?
Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a good example. When I joined Sotheby’s, she had never come up at auction before. I mentioned her as someone I’d like to include in one of our sales, and I was told it didn’t make sense because she’d never been sold at auction. But I knew her gallery sold almost exclusively to museums, which meant it was almost impossible for private collectors to acquire her work. I knew that if one came up at auction, there would be enormous demand.
Sure enough, the first work sold for around $150,000, and the second for about $1.5 million. That’s almost unheard of for an artist making their auction debut. Usually, a market builds gradually. But by understanding the primary market, the demand and the scarcity of the work, I knew there would be strong competition if a painting came to auction. She’s an unusual example, but a very high-profile one.
The third element I look at very closely is the curatorial following. Which artists are being included in museum exhibitions? Which artists are entering permanent collections? Museums and curators are generally trying to operate outside the market. They’re not looking at who sells well at auction; they’re asking which artists are making important work and who will still matter in one, two or three generations’ time.
For me, that’s almost the most important factor, because museums, especially publicly funded ones, have to be incredibly careful about the acquisitions they make.
You’ve helped establish more than 200 auction records for artists from Africa and its diaspora. Yet the market often seems to recognise artists before museums or art history do. How do you navigate that tension?
As I said, museums like to think they’re separate from the market. It’s never quite as clear-cut as that. Having said that, there are artists who’ve sold for six figures at auction who have never, ever been in a museum show or entered a museum collection. So it’s not always the case that one follows the other.
I agree that it can be vulgar to talk about the numbers, about the money. But reaching new heights does reflect a newfound appreciation, understanding and recognition of African art.
Now, if we look at the very top end of the market, there are still very, very few African artists who command a million dollars at auction. There are probably more white men named Tom who sell for more than all of the top-selling African artists. The artists who have sold for over a million dollars, I can count them on one hand.
Since we’re talking about that top end of the market, it’s worth comparing it directly to where a European modernist of similar stature stands. If we take two modernists working in the mid-20th century, say, a European master like Alberto Giacometti and a Nigerian pioneer like Ben Enwonwu, we see an enormous disparity in their secondary-market ceilings. Is this primarily an infrastructure issue?
It’s partly infrastructure and it’s partly the market. There is nobody representing the Ben Enwonwu market. There is no one protecting that market. Take Giacometti. The Giacometti estate has a foundation, there’s an estate, there’s a blue-chip gallery representing it, there are lawyers involved, there’s a whole machine set up to protect Giacometti’s legacy and the value of those works.
And it’s not just the people legally representing Giacometti. There are also collectors who have spent six, seven or eight figures on a Giacometti sculpture. They’re invested in protecting that market. If you’ve spent $40 million on a Giacometti sculpture, you’re not going to let the next one sell for $400,000.
There’s a whole market infrastructure of collectors and investors who recognise that, once they’ve invested in an artist, they also have an interest in protecting the value of that investment. I think that’s a lesson that is still slow to come to the African art market.
“If we’re really talking about parity, it’s when African cities become global art cities.” — Hannah O’Leary
That idea of collectors actively protecting an artist’s market raises an obvious question about who should be doing that protecting in Africa’s case. Are you saying that African collectors should invest more in African artists?
No, no, no—that’s not exactly what I’m saying. I think it comes back to the idea of patronage. There’s much more to being an art collector, and an art patron, than simply buying an artwork. One aspect of that can be supporting prices on the secondary market. Not everyone can do that, of course. Not every Giacometti collector does that. But if you hold significant works by a blue-chip artist, then you also have an interest in protecting that market.
There are other forms of patronage as well. You can invest in an artist’s career. If you’re buying a young artist in their first gallery exhibition, you can continue following their work and encouraging others to collect it. With a mid-career artist, you might support their first Venice Biennale presentation, help fund institutional exhibitions, or contribute to a monograph. Those are all forms of patronage that I think are incredibly important.
And I’m not saying that doesn’t exist in Africa. Of course it does. It’s just that, as with so many things, it’s on a much smaller scale than in the Western market, which, after all, has had hundreds of years to develop.
Would you agree that Western institutions and collectors still play a “gatekeeping” role in determining not only visibility, but also the value of artworks?
“Gatekeeping” is a very negative term. But I don’t think you can ignore the fact that there are tastemakers in the art market. I remember reading a very interesting university study which came up with a formula for success for contemporary artists. If you do a certain MFA, like the MFA at Yale, if you’re represented by a gallery like Gagosian, and if you’re collected by a family like the Rubells, then that’s the formula for stratospheric success. If you don’t have a major gallery, if you’re not in a major museum collection, and if you don’t come to the attention of those major collectors, then you’re probably never going to make it.
I thought it was very interesting. And again, it doesn’t just speak to where the barriers might be for African artists. Very few artists anywhere in the world make it big. I also think there’s an opportunity here. Does Africa have to follow the same formula? Who are our Rubells? African collectors should be taken seriously. They could be the major art players of the future.
If I go back to the parallels with other markets, when Sotheby’s entered the Asian art market in the 1980s, it was still a very small regional, growing market. Today, Asian collectors represent something like one in every five dollars spent at Sotheby’s.
Don’t forget that it’s not just about where the artist comes from. It’s also about the audience you’re marketing to and nurturing. And I think one of the conversations that consistently gets left out when we talk about the contemporary African art market is the African collector and the collecting potential of the continent. Even if you go to a city like Lagos, it’s still a relatively small number of collectors, especially at the top end of the market. But the potential there is huge today.
As you and I know, Africa is the youngest continent, it has the fastest-growing population and some of the fastest-growing wealth in the world. I have no doubt that, in ten or twenty years’ time, African collectors will be taken much more seriously by the international art market, not just by the African art market. So that formula is a fact of life. You call them gatekeepers, I call them tastemakers. It’s a fact of life.
What, in your view, would need to happen for Africa to become a major global trading hub for art?
Well, one of the things I always say is: what if some of these museums we’re building across Africa became places where artists like Jeff Koons wanted to exhibit? What if Jeff Koons insisted on having an exhibition at an African museum? What if Larry Gagosian decided he wanted to show at ART X Lagos? If we’re really talking about parity, it’s when African cities become global art cities. And we’re still a long, long way from that.
That’s not to say we don’t already have an international audience coming to art fairs across the continent, or that the international art press isn’t paying attention to what’s happening in Africa. But we’re still a long way from seeing non-African artists wanting their work to be shown and seen in Africa. I think that would be a very interesting turn of events. And I’m actually very positive about it. I think there’s every potential that it will happen.
Talking about art fairs on the continent, when evaluating an artist’s long-term secondary market potential, how do you weigh a debut at a specialized fair like 1-54 against an appearance at a generalist international fair?
I think sometimes those fairs are victims of their own success. If I think about 1-54, which was the first dedicated fair for contemporary African art, they consistently introduce galleries from Africa and galleries representing African artists. And once those artists become bigger, better known and more valuable, you often see them move on to Art Basel or Frieze.
I’m a huge fan of what they do, and they consistently show both emerging and established artists. But it is a fact of the market that there’s a regional African market, and then there are artists who move into the global contemporary scene.
The fairs in Africa are hugely important because they’re reaching an African audience. They create opportunities not only for galleries from across the continent, but also for international galleries to bring their artists to Africa.
One development I find particularly interesting is the advocacy of artists themselves. I was talking earlier about the idea of Jeff Koons exhibiting in Africa, but what we’ve actually seen is African diaspora artists wanting to show their work on the continent.
African American artists, Black British artists, they’re increasingly interested in exhibiting in Africa, whether through art fairs or museums. That’s something that has really developed over the last few years. So I think art fairs play an enormous role in this market.
That brings me to a concern I often hear among gallerists. Some argue that specialised fairs can become a form of “ghettoisation”, while others see them as essential platforms. How do you think galleries should navigate that choice?
Well, first of all, the irony is that doing a fair in Africa is often more expensive than doing an international art fair because of the logistics. Travel, accommodation, customs, none of these things are as straightforward as they are in Europe or the United States. So budget is always part of the equation, and that shouldn’t be ignored.
When I think back to the work I did at Sotheby’s, we would always ask ourselves: does this work belong in an African art sale or in an international contemporary sale? Ultimately, it always came back to the collectors. Where is the audience for this work? Where is it most likely to sell well?
I hope galleries approach fairs in the same way. They have a great artist, so where is the best place to show that work? Is it Abu Dhabi? Is it Johannesburg? It’s always about doing what’s best for the artist and achieving the best result.
There are strong local markets in Africa where it makes more sense to show at an African fair, quite apart from supporting our own domestic markets, than at an international fair. I’ve spoken to galleries after fairs, and sometimes they sell out in New York. Other times they spend a fortune to be there and don’t make a single sale, or they end up selling only to the same collectors they already knew.
So it’s not always true that an international fair delivers the best results. I think you have to take a bespoke approach to every artist, every work and every audience.
Another striking feature of today’s market is gender. Women artists made up 52.8% of African art auction sales value in 2024. Yet globally, Black women artists still account for just 0.1% of total auction sales value. How do you make sense of this apparent paradox?
I think it’s interesting because Julie Mehretu is the highest-selling artist from the African continent, hands down. No African art auction anywhere in the world has ever made $10 million. So it’s a complete anomaly between one work by one artist being sold and a thousand other artworks being sold for less money.
One of my favourite facts is that the highest-selling artists from Africa are women. But that tells one story. If you actually mine down the data, you’ll see that the volume of works offered by women is still much smaller than that of men. Again, I’m an art historian. There’s a lot of revisionist art history happening around women artists of the twentieth century.
The fact of the matter is that there simply weren’t as many opportunities for women artists in the twentieth century as there were for men. Very different today, obviously. In the twenty-first century, it’s much easier for women.
Having said that, there are still the realities of being a woman. I can think of a few female artists who have recently become mothers, and that takes them out of the workplace for a certain amount of time. So there are still realities of being a woman that should be considered.
But yes, I find it a really interesting anomaly that women achieve the headline prices, but they don’t sell as consistently or in the same volume as men. Julie Mehretu, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Njideka Akunyili Crosby… if you work your way down the list of the highest-selling artists from Africa, I think you get to number seven or eight before you find a man, which is Michael Armitage.
In your experience, do African women artists tend to follow different career trajectories or market patterns than male artists?
I have a personal theory—and it’s not scientifically proven, and I don’t want to generalise about all men or all women—but in my personal experience, I find that women are less likely to play to the market than men. By that, I mean they don’t necessarily chase sales, fame or fortune. They tend to focus more on the work they’re making and are often happier to work with a smaller gallery or a more loyal group of collectors.
That’s been my personal experience over the last few years. If we think back to the period between 2020 and 2022, when we saw a huge surge of interest in Black figurative painting, I noticed a number of male artists changing their practice to follow that aesthetic. I noticed that much more among men than among women.
I think women tend to play the long game. They focus more on their work and less on the market. But, like I say, that’s not scientifically proven at all, and I wouldn’t suggest that all men or all women follow the same pattern.
“It’s a crime that twentieth-century African art is still largely absent from the global art historical canon.”— Hannah O’Leary
You recently left Sotheby’s after ten years to launch your own advisory firm specialising in modern and contemporary African art, while remaining a consultant for Sotheby’s. At this stage of your career, why did you feel it was important to move from leading an auction department to advising collectors independently?
I think we’re at a very interesting point. There are collectors who’ve been collecting for ten or twenty years—people I’ve worked with throughout my entire career—who have now reached a point where they really want to focus on building important collections. It’s one of the few collecting categories where many of the most important works are not already locked away in museum collections. And it’s only a matter of time before some of these masterpieces end up in permanent collections and are no longer available on the market.
It’s a very exciting moment to be a serious collector in this field. There are opportunities today that simply won’t be around for very long. That’s really what I’m focused on: working with long-term collectors who are already deeply engaged with the field and want to take their collections to a new level of importance and curation.
I often think about the great collectors of the nineteenth century. You could never recreate those collections in European art today. I think there’s a similar opportunity in African art right now to build truly major collections. And that’s not just true for private collectors. I work with museums as well. This is an opportunity that exists now but may not exist in another ten or twenty years.
Looking ahead, where do you see the African art market in twenty years’ time?
Personally, I’m very history-focused. I want to see the great African masters of the twentieth century become household names. I want them to be taught in schools and universities as part of global art history.
I think it’s a crime that twentieth-century African art is still largely absent from the global art historical canon. That’s incredibly important to me. Artists like Malangatana, Ben Enwonwu and Gerard Sekoto should, in my view, be worth millions alongside their international peers.
That’s where I think the market will take us. But there’s a mountain of work to be done before that can happen.
Read also
Touria El Glaoui, Founder of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, on Building Beyond Visibility
“A Home for Us, by Us”: How Tokini Peterside-Schwebig Made ART X Lagos a Landmark for African Art
At Africa Basel’s Second Edition, High Stakes and a Raw New Rhythm
Bridging Africa and The World Through Contemporary Art 
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