Over the past ten years, the market for modern and contemporary African art has ridden a bit of a rollercoaster. The latter half of the 2010s was marked by a steady upward trajectory, with record-setting sales like Irma Stern’s Arab Priest (1945) and Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Bush Babies (2017), both in 2018. Those sales were accompanied by some auction houses creating specific auctions for contemporary African art too. And some European art institutions also took note, assisted by international art fairs focusing on contemporary African art such as 1-54 London. The beginning of this decade brought a frenzied, speculative boom, particularly in ultra-contemporary categories around 2021/22.
The market has since cooled, but we have nonetheless seen record auction prices, with women artists dominating sales. Julie Mehretu’s Walkers With the Dawn and Morning (2008) sold for $10.7 million at Sotheby’s in 2023. Broadly speaking, however, this segment of the market remains much overlooked in the auction world: African art accounts for less than 1% of total contemporary auction sales. Given that auction sales are used as a proxy for the market, this then plays into how the world views the scale of collector interest in African art at large.
Capital Art has previously discussed how communities of art collectors are themselves shaping the market. But 2025 is actively ushering in a new chapter of visibility and growth, driven by a force that sometimes goes undiscussed—museum exhibitions. Leading cultural institutions in Europe are now placing African modernists and living artists at the center of their programming. (This article uses the term “modernist” broadly, referring to early- to mid-20th-century artists who pioneered new forms, techniques, and philosophies of art-making to reckon with the pace and globalized complexity of a modernizing world.) The number of museum exhibitions this year spotlighting M&C African art is likely to raise its market profile considerably, offering an unprecedented opportunity for collectors to enter the market for this diverse and exciting body of work.
The Collector and the Canon
For the average American or European collector, awareness of modern and contemporary (hereafter abbreviated M&C) African art may be a primary pain point for engaging with the field. This means that broader institutional promotion of this niche has the potential to transform patterns of demand. In the meantime, the dialogues that exhibitions spur between African visual culture and received European “canons” can refine and reshape our understanding of both material from an art-historical perspective. The resulting intercultural resonances can likewise shift collector demographics and transform collecting approaches for M&C African art.
Take, as a first example, Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu’s solo show at the Galleria Borghese, Rome, which runs until 14 September. Titled Wangechi Mutu. Black Soil Poems, the exhibition comprises a suite of site-specific interventions in dialogue with the Galleria’s world-renowned collection of European Baroque (17th-century, give or take fifty years) painting and sculpture. The exhibition constitutes a landmark for the museum: Mutu is the first living woman artist to stage an exhibition in its galleries.
Image credit: “Room IV” by █ Slices of Light ✴ █▀ ▀ ▀,
In the air above Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 1620s Abduction of Proserpina, for instance, Mutu has suspended strings of enormous rosary beads called Prayers. The hanging beads trace asymmetric catenaries in a space of neat orthogonal geometries. They comment on the intrinsic importance of repetition to religious ritual while perhaps underscoring the repetitive rigidity of the niches, engaged columns, and marble tiling in its 17th-century Roman surroundings. These and related questions of rhythm, materiality, and institutional power undergird the show.
On a fundamental level, Mutu’s interventions disrupt the canonical stability of European art history, challenging viewers to consider its exclusions. In a country where African art has historically been absent from both museums and the market, Black Soil Poems provides a moment of visibility and vehicle for social impact few other contexts can. It signals to the European market at large that contemporary African art should belong not at the periphery but rather the center of the continent’s most prestigious cultural spaces.
“Artistic Circulations”
Earlier in the year, Paris Noir at the Centre Pompidou, a European art institution in Paris (19 March—30 June 2025), sought to recover and foreground the contributions of 20th-century African and diasporic artists active in the French capital. Headlining its marquee is a 1947 self-portrait by the South African artist Gerard Sekoto—incidentally, owned by South African collector Frank Kilburn, chairperson of the local auction house Strauss & Co. The painting emblematizes the show’s ambition to put forth “a living and often entirely new map of Paris.”
This case study reveals an indirect channel linking museum exhibitions to the market for related works: beyond network effects and educational initiatives that elevate artists deserving of broader recognition, the accompanying research and scholarly catalogues enable collectors to better situate these artists in their geographical and chronological conception of art history. In other words, exhibitions can be instrumental in contextualizing bodies of work for collectors both seasoned and new, deepening their understanding and appreciation of those works. This cultivation of knowledge and interest can, in turn, spur collecting momentum.
The Paris Noir show was subtitled, “Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950–2000.” That first piece, “artistic circulations,” underpins a wider pattern we see throughout European and American curatorial practice in the past decade. Exhibitions like Surrealism Beyond Borders (2021; The Met, New York, and Tate Modern, London), for example, have aimed to reframe global 20th-century visual traditions in contexts of exchange—across geographical borders as well as stylistic ones.
Surrealism Beyond Borders featured the work of the French-Egyptian artist Antoine Malliarakis (1905–90), known as Mayo, who rejected categorization as a Surrealist but whose style finds resonances with the European exponents of that movement. The curators hung his canvas Coup de bâtons (1937) alongside other paintings by members of the Cairo-based avant-garde group Art et Liberté, adding social and political context without folding these artists under any reductive label. The installation thus situated the Egyptian avant-garde in a global circulation of visual vernaculars in the time of the Second World War.
More recently at The Met, its newly refurbished and reinstalled galleries for African, Oceanic, and ancient American art is hosting its inaugural dossier show, Iba N’Diaye: Between Latitude and Longitude (31 May 2025—31 May 2026). A collaboration between the curatorial departments of African Art and European Paintings, the small exhibition spotlights the French-Senegalese painter N’Diaye (1928–2008) as a pivotal figure in African modernism. It traces his study of Old Master paintings while featuring a new acquisition, N’Diaye’s Tabaski III, in another example of the introduction-and-contextualization we saw in parts of the Surrealism show.
Certainly, these exhibitions can put certain M&C African artists on collectors’ radar. But more deeply, they allow collectors to see firsthand the role and impact of those artists in broader local and global artistic ecosystems. They encourage collectors to look beyond traditional confines of time periods, geographic networks, and canonical names, offering accessible entry points for them to both expand and deepen their collecting practice. And for those familiar with, say, Mayo’s oeuvre, these shows can propose ways of seeing it afresh—whether in or out of familiar contexts, in chronological sequence or in isolation, in conversation with other works or in contradiction.
Dynamics in Flux: Institutions and the Market
Museums no longer reign supreme as arbiters of taste. That was the age of Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (1929–1940), who through landmark publications and exhibitions acquainted the American public consciousness—publics, scholars, collectors alike—with 20th-century visual culture. In the 21st century, with unlimited access to digital information, the dynamics around developing and making taste have now become increasingly decentralized.
But the power of institutions in shaping the market remains. By reassessing established artists and movements and introducing new ones, a well-conceived museum exhibition can serve as a bridge between art-historical scholarship and collecting practice. It can inform collectors’ philosophy, sharpen their acumen.
This is a year of such shows for M&C African art at leading European institutions. In addition to Black Soil Poems at the Galleria Borghese and Paris Noir at the Centre Pompidou, Nigerian Modernism will soon begin a seven-month run at Tate Modern (8 October 2025—10 May 2026). It probes the “artistic networks which spanned Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos and Enugu, as well as London, Munich and Paris”—once again, the through line of global exchange shines through. Anyone enthralled by the exhibition might want to head to Art X Lagos (6–9 November 2025) to see the work of contemporary artists who walk in the footsteps of the Nigerian modernists. Similarly, perhaps Tate will introduce a new group of collectors to the pottery of Ladi Kwali or sculpture of Abayomi Barber this fall. (Other key 2025 art-world dates to mark on your calendar are linked here.)
The bottom line is that the institutional landscape for M&C African art is changing faster now than at any point in at least the past two decades. In a practical sense, the number of exhibitions in European art institutions (amongst others worldwide) featuring M&C African artists this year presents an excellent opportunity for collectors to deepen their understanding of this niche. As public awareness and artists’ profiles increase, we might very well see a parallel rise in activity in the market for these works, particularly in Europe—where prior engagement has been low and where the majority of these shows are being held.
For collectors and investors prepared to recognize the significance of this development, the coming years offer an excellent opportunity to secure works ahead of what is likely to be a sustained, broad-based increase in demand. In this sense, there is no better time to explore the market for modern and contemporary African art than now.
Guest contributor Weili Jin studies economics and art history at Stanford University.