Expanding coverage of women artists
If you are looking for inspiration, here are several lists of female artists from Africa and the African diaspora.
Wikipedia stubs
Links out to lists of articles about women artists from countries around the world are currently listed in this Wikipedia category. You can click on the lists for countries in Africa to find female artists from those places (example: Algerian women artists, Kenyan women artists, South African women artists, etc.) Some of the articles are just stubs which could be expanded. You can also expand this category by adding any articles you create or expand if they are not already listed here.
Monographs on African Artists - bibliography from Smithsonian Libraries
This annotated bibliography (list of books) by the librarian at the Smithsonian's Museum of African Art includes both men and women, artists active in Africa and those strongly associated with Africa.
sample museum projects featuring women artists associated with Africa
- African Modernism in America, 1947–1967(American Federation of Arts and Fisk University Galleries, forthcoming 2022)
- Black Artists & Modernism(University of the Arts London and Middlesex University, c. 2020) - Black Artists & Modernism is a 3-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research focuses on the relationship between the art-works of artists of African and Asian descent and Modernism, in particular art-works in public collections throughout the UK.
- I Am ... Contemporary Women Artists of Africa(Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2020)
- Global Feminisms Remix(Brooklyn Museum, 2007)
- In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present(Guggenheim Museum, 1996) - includes photographers Zarina Bhimji and Lamia Naji and sooo many men
- African art exhibitions in New York(Center for African Art / Museum for African Art, 1985-2012) - The Africa Center has digitized the former Museum for African Art exhibition catalogues and made them freely available online -- see esp. Personal Affects, Looking Both Ways, and Secrecy.
Video
African Art and Women Artists by
This 19-minute video in Films on Demand focuses on the Kenyan artist and writer Elizabeth Orchardson-Mazrui. Rooted deeply in African soil, her art comments on life, particularly the contradictory and often hypocritical attitudes of African society toward women; her teaching at the university champions the concept that African art is a valid academic discipline, that African art is intrinsically different in being part of life rather than (as in Western art) a separate element.