"African art" is not a style. It is a continent of fifty-four countries, and the artists below have almost nothing in common with one another beyond the accident of the category they get filed under. Grouping them is useful only as a starting point for looking at them separately.
One thing to say plainly before the list: we do not make an African-themed paint by numbers design. Our range is landscapes, wildlife, cabins and florals. This page is here because these artists are worth knowing about, not as a way into a product.
Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993)
A South African painter, and also a pianist and composer, which is less often mentioned than it should be. Sekoto trained as a teacher and turned to painting full time in the late 1930s, working in the urban Black neighborhoods of his day — Sophiatown in Johannesburg, District Six in Cape Town, Eastwood in Pretoria — at a period when almost nobody was painting those places from the inside.
He left South Africa for Paris in 1947 and never lived there again, spending the rest of his life in exile. The paintings are warm, densely colored street scenes: people on stoops, children in the road, figures walking somewhere. He is generally regarded as a founding figure of Black South African modernism, and much of what he painted was demolished not long afterward under forced removals, which gives the work a documentary weight it was not originally asking for.
Walter Battiss (1906–1982)
The most genuinely strange artist on this list, in the best sense. Battiss was a South African painter who spent years studying San rock art and let it work its way into a loose, linear, high-color style of his own.
He is also remembered for Fook Island, an imaginary country he invented and then furnished properly — with its own alphabet, currency, stamps, maps and passports, some of which he issued to friends. It began as a joke and turned into a decades-long body of work. It is the rare case of an artist's private mythology being funny and substantial at the same time.
William Kentridge (born 1955)
South African, and probably the best known living artist from the country. Kentridge is a draftsman above all, working mostly in charcoal, and his signature method came out of that: he draws a scene, photographs it, erases and redraws part of it, photographs it again, and builds an animated film out of the successive states of a single sheet.
The erasures never fully disappear, so the finished films carry a smudged record of everything that came before — which is very much the point, given the histories he works with. He also directs opera and theater, and makes tapestries, prints and large mechanical sculptures.
Julie Mehretu (born 1970)
Born in Addis Ababa and raised largely in the United States, Mehretu makes very large abstract paintings built in layers: architectural plans, maps, stadium diagrams and city grids overlaid with storms of gestural marks until the underlying drawing is half-buried.
They are abstract, but they are about specific places and specific events, and they reward standing close and then walking back. Her work is held by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Whitney.
Wangechi Mutu (born 1972)
Kenyan-American, working between Nairobi and New York, and best known for collage and sculpture rather than painting on canvas — figures assembled from cut paper, ink, found imagery and material.
Her most visible work is probably The NewOnes, will free Us, four bronze figures individually titled The Seated I through IV, installed in September 2019 in the four niches on the Fifth Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The facade was completed in 1902 to Richard Morris Hunt's design with those niches intended for sculpture, and they had stood empty ever since. Mutu's figures inaugurated the Met's annual facade commission and stayed up until June 2020. The pieces rework the caryatid — the sculpted, almost always female figure used as architectural support — which is a pointed thing to install on the front of that particular building.
Barthélémy Toguo (born 1967)
Cameroonian, based between Paris and Bandjoun in western Cameroon. Toguo works in watercolor, painting, sculpture, installation and performance, and the watercolors are the place to start: fluid, bleeding, figurative, often dealing with borders, migration and the body.
He also founded Bandjoun Station in Cameroon, an art center and residency with working farmland attached, built on the argument that African artists should have serious institutions on the continent rather than only exhibiting off it.
Francis Essoua Kalu, who works as Enfant Précoce (born 1989)
Born in Cameroon, in France since the age of nine, and a dancer before he was a painter — he only started painting in 2013, and is self-taught. He first became widely known by photographing himself sitting with his canvases outside the major Paris museums and posting the results, which is a fairly direct comment on who gets shown inside them.
The paintings are crowded, high-color figurative scenes, and he works textile into some of them. He has exhibited in Paris galleries and showed at Dak'Art, the Dakar biennale, in 2018.
Ntombephi "Induna" Ntobela (born 1966)
Included deliberately, because she is frequently miscategorized as a painter and is not one. Ntobela is a beadwork artist, born in Bizana in the Eastern Cape, and she co-founded the Ubuhle collective in 1999 on a former sugar plantation in KwaZulu-Natal.
The form is called ndwango, from the word for cloth — black fabric stretched like a canvas and covered entirely in tiny glass beads sewn one at a time. A single panel can take more than ten months. They read as paintings from across a room and then resolve into something else entirely as you approach, which is the whole effect. Ubuhle means beauty, and refers specifically to the way light moves on glass.
If you want to paint something along these lines
Two honest observations rather than a recommendation.
The first is that most of the work above is a poor fit for numbered painting, and that is a compliment to it. Kentridge's charcoal depends on smudge and erasure; Mehretu's layering depends on marks made at speed; Ntobela's panels are not paint at all. Flattening any of them into numbered regions would remove the thing that makes them work.
The second is that if you want a specific African scene on your wall — a place you have been, a photograph from a trip, a family house — that is a job for a custom canvas from your own photograph rather than a stock design. Strong directional light and an uncluttered background convert best, and it comes in 12x16, 16x20 and 18x24.
A note on how this page used to read
An earlier version of this article described several of these artists incorrectly — it called Ntombephi Ntobela a painter, misspelled her name, attributed invented work titles to Francis Essoua Kalu, and advertised African paint by numbers kits that we have never sold. It has been rewritten. If you spot something here that is still wrong, we would rather hear about it than not.
