In Africa, the majority of artist groups emerged after the wave of independence. While some artists started their collectives in art schools based on aesthetic concerns, others got together to share the same ideology. The unifying trait is that they flourished locally and were influenced by sociopolitical views. Some groups tend to be small while others consist of a large number of participants. Below we start the series with the prominent art groups founded during the 1970s.

Nsukka Group

The Nsukka Group was formed in 1970 around a revivalist movement that began at the University of Nigeria which promoted the traditional painting in Nigeria in order to raise questions about ethnic identity. The movement began following the appointment of the artist Uche Okeke as head of the Fine Art Department at the University. Okeke had been a proponent of natural synthesis, and after the Nigerian civil war sought to explore Nigerian identity through traditional Uli art. He took the aesthetics of Uli – a flat, decorative style of art, usually drawn onto the body that features specific motifs and symbols – and applied it to contemporary Nigerian art, inspiring his students to follow suit. As a result the Nsukka Group was formed and has been influential in the development of modern Nigerian art with the works of artists including Uche Okeke, El Anatsui, Chike Aniakor, Tayo Adenaike, Olu Oguibe, Ada Udechukwu, and Obiora Udechukwu.

Crystalist Group

Founded in Khartoum, Sudan in 1971, the Crystalist Group was a conceptual art group who challenged the local art establishment and sought to challenge the dominating masculine vision of art in the country. The collective was founded at the College of Fine Art in Khartoum by the Sudanese artists Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq and her students Muhammad Hamid Shaddad and Nayla El Tayib. In 1978, they published the Crystalist Manifesto in which they argued that the universe is like a crystal cube: transparent and constantly changing according to the viewer’s position. The transparency of the crystal implied the possibility of a new universally accessible language that paradoxically makes every other language intelligible. It also called for art based on sensory experience, intuitive knowledge, and the pursuit of pleasure of the absurd kind. The manifesto was intended to challenge the dominance of the older, more established art movement in Sudan known as the Khartoum School as well as put across their vision of art from a female perspective. The group was multi-disciplinary, painting pictures and staging performances and installations.

Vohou-Vohou

Originally founded in the early 1970s by students of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, the group Vohou-Vohou started its activities in the 1980s. The country was marked by a great economic expansion during the 1970s, even though the continental region has suffered several coups. Taking advantage of the cultural ferment, Vohou-Vohou was formed around the refusal of using very expensive painting materials by Youssouf Bath, Kra Nguessan, Théodore Koudougnon, Yacouba Touré, and Mathilde Moreau. Inspired by an aesthetic defined by some Martinican painters – which required the use of African motifs into their work, the founding members formulated their manifesto around the exploration of an African aesthetic unknown to the Western art world. This was epitomized by the use of materials and resources that artists took from the local surroundings and utilized as art supplies. Although the collective still exists per se, today Vohou-Vohou radiates throughout West Africa as an artistic vision that is taught in art schools and exhibited in museums.

Laboratoire Agit’Art

Founded in Dakar, Senegal in 1974, Agit’Art was a revolutionary and subversive art group that sought to transform the nature of artistic practice by combining traditional African performance and creativity with a modern aesthetic. Established by the artist Issa Samb, the filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, the painter El Hadji Sy, and the playwright Youssoupha Dione, Agit’Art was an interdisciplinary collective, devising street performances, improvisational happenings, installations and workshops. Although diverse in their practice, they were united in critiquing and challenging the prevailing Negritude philosophy in Senegal. Members of Agit'Art understood their initiative as a counter power that brings intellectual and artistic diversity into a homogeneous art environment. Performance and installations as well as the publication of manifestos proved to be the most expressive and recurrent forms of expressions applied to the political and social ideas they agitated for. Today Agit’Art is considered to be one of the most eclectic artist groups known to contemporary history of art in Africa.