Through insightful positioning pieces, in-depth interviews, features, profiles, and reviews, ART AFRICA captures and reports on the latest developments around contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora.
ART AFRICA today sees itself as a vehicle that celebrates Africa’s future-present. Our writers and contributors produce insightful and thought-provoking content that includes some of the most significant thought leaders of our time. Committed to the idea of Africa as the hub and matrix of a changing world, ART AFRICA recognises the great importance of building connections and growing networks. While the digital provides the means, ART AFRICA is about building people, building ideas, and building cultures recreated through exchange; but not forgetting its origins as a ground-breaking print publication.
Art Testimonials
What our supporters say:
Importantly Art Africa is the only publication that we can proudly take abroad and use to introduce and gain further exposure for art and artists of our country. As such it serves as valuable ambassadorial ‘cultural ammunition’ to showcase our artistic production and emergent creative industries. I believe that they should be widely circulated internationally, as well as nationally and locally. Copies of the publication also become important reference documentation and contribute to a valuable and necessary archive. Where numerous other arts publications have withered and disappeared Art Africa has miraculously survived – this in itself is testament to its worth and evidences its value within the sector.
Dominic Thorburn
Art Africa, the premier contemporary art journal in South Africa, is the window on South African art for the rest of the world — and has been since its launching in 2002. From where I sit in the U.S., I’m convinced that the wider art communities – museums & galleries, art schools & libraries, collectors, critics, artists – want to know what’s happening on the South African art scene. The feature essays in Art Africa provide valuable viewpoints, and the exhibition reviews keep us current on younger, up-and-coming artists. Art Africa offers a ready-made vehicle of cultural diplomacy.
Janet Stanley
Art Africa’s audience is diverse and reaches across both secondary and tertiary education levels, academic and popular readerships. It is a sought after marker of contemporary visual arts and cross-disciplinary work in South Africa (and across the African continent) by international tertiary institutions, galleries, museums and cultural organisations. If one is looking for a barometer for contemporary visual arts and cross-disciplinary work in Africa then Art Africa provides such an instrument. Furthermore, it is a publication that has managed to sustain high levels of journalistic and design excellence and has become an acknowledged source of in-depth information in its field.
David Andrew
Art Africa
The History of ART AFRICA. Writing art history since 2002
For too long, there was too little written about contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora. Writing art history from an African perspective is essential to changing the narrative about art from the continent and owning it proudly.
After opening our contemporary art gallery in 1999, our next step was to launch ART AFRICA in 2002. Our conviction was that Africa had to take a proud stance and to showcase itself from the continent and with an African voice. It has never been easy to navigate between the 54 countries that make up the continent, never mind the cultural and language differences. But through intellectual dialogue and the discourse on the internationalism and multiculturalism of the arts from Africa – we have made it easier to navigate the conversations.
In 2015 we went international, changing the title of the publication to ART AFRICA. Over the last 18 years, the magazine has become a collector’s item – our highly curated editorial strategy and intelligent design ensure that every single edition of the magazine makes a valuable addition to our archive. The publication is also a vital resource, found on the library shelves of global art collectors, museums and gallery directors, academics, artists and those just wanting to learn more about contemporary from Africa.
Through insightful positioning pieces, in-depth interviews, features, profiles, and reviews, ART AFRICA captures and reports on the latest developments around contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora.
ART AFRICA is on the move, experimental, provocative, intelligent, ART AFRICA today sees itself as a vehicle that celebrates Africa’s future-present. Always optimistic – even at the heart of a dark reflection – ART AFRICA conjures possibility, champions dreams and tracks innovation; inspired by a worldwide transformation in communications, business models, design thinking, and art practice, ART AFRICA is here to show and tell us about the positive outcomes of risk-taking. Focused on African culture, creativity and the arts in general while holding onto its core market – the visual arts – ART AFRICA understands that life is meaningless without dreams, tastes hollow without love, and viewpoints pretentious if not profoundly felt. Fusing a great heart with a great mind proves the greatest challenge. ART AFRICA delivers this vision.
Art Platforms
ART AFRICA works across multiple platforms; print, digital and online.
Print publication (annual): a space for critical reflection and debate compiled into a collectable publication; an invaluable archive on the contemporary arts in Africa.
Multimedia edition (three editions a year): with up-to-date news and reviews, broadening the platforms on which ART AFRICA reaches its audience.
ART AFRICA newsletter (weekly): provides its audience with current and exclusive information on the contemporary art scene, keeping them connected with happenings in the creative industries.
www.artafricamagazine.com: an integral part of constructing a new African network, linking the different elements of ART AFRICA to form a creative hub connecting people across the world. · Social Media: an integrated approach providing content that talks to the vision of ART AFRICA, effectively used to build its creative network.
ART AFRICA is committed to developing the creative industries through its services, include video, digital publishing and book publishing.
ART AFRICA engages its audience in a world that is up for grabs, sometimes inspiring, sometimes rueful, but always connected to its key drive as an experiment in freedom, a change agent. Lured by the nascent emergence of a new humanism – a new idea of why we work together, what we can learn from each other – ART AFRICA seeks to broaden its platform and points of interface. Committed to the idea of Africa as the hub and matrix of a changing world, ART AFRICA recognises the great importance of building connections. While the digital provides the means, ART AFRICA is about building people, building ideas, building cultures recreated through exchange; not forgetting its origins as a ground-breaking print publication.
“As far as Africa is concerned, colonialism is over. Apartheid is over too. Africans are now the free masters of their own destiny. This is why from an intellectual and political point of view, there is no turning away from the difficult work of freedom.” Achille Mbembe
Mbembe’s rousing proposition is one that ART AFRICA supports, along with the caveat that, from an intellectual, political, and cultural viewpoint, this rousing proposition will make no sense without tackling “the difficult work of freedom.” Verb rather than noun, proposition and not statement, ART AFRICA, today, is matter as the fodder for new-and-changing opinions.
Art Patrons
We’d like you to be a patron:
The pervasive Coronavirus pandemic has thrown the world into mayhem. Galleries have closed, art fairs have closed, and so many art print publications have closed their doors. This has affected us all, the artists, the writers, the curators, the biennales and art fairs. This the cultural ecology that ART AFRICA publication supports and vice versa.
ART AFRICA needs your assistance as patrons of the arts to keep ongoing.
Every contribution will make a difference and will help us to continue to write African art history from an African perspective and, proudly, from the African continent.
We need to be able to commission our writers and contributors. We need to nurture emerging artists and creative practitioners so that the next wave of thought leaders can build on what we have been able to achieve so far!
