Jorge M. and Darlene Pérez have gifted Tate 36 works by artists from Africa and its diaspora. It’s the second time the married collectors have made a high-profile donation to the museum network in the past year, having previously given Tate a large-scale Joan Mitchell painting.
The artworks in the gift are by an intergenerational range of artists, spanning Seydou Keïta, a Malian photographer born in the 1920s, to Joy Labinjo, a rising British painter of Nigerian descent who was born in 1994.
In some cases, Tate has already made a significant effort to spotlight artists included in the gift. Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the late Nigeria-born, England-based photographer, was already well-represented in the Tate collection, as was J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, a Nigerian photographer with work currently on view in Tate Modern’s “Nigerian Modernism” survey.
But in other cases, the gift has helped introduce artists to the holdings of the Tate. Chéri Samba, an influential Congolese painter, is now making his debut in the Tate collection. So is Adama Kouyaté, a Malian photographer.
Alongside the gift, Osei Bonsu, the organizer of “Nigerian Modernism,” has also been named Jorge M. Pérez Senior Curator, International Art, Africa and Diaspora.
In a statement, Bonsu said, “Jorge M. and Darlene Pérez have developed a dynamic and significant collection of works by African and African Diaspora artists and have shown a deep appreciation for these artists’ contributions to art history. With their generous support, I look forward to further expanding my research and networks across Africa and its global diaspora, and to sharing this work with visitors to Tate Modern.”
Below, a look at six works from the Pérezes’ gift.
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Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1957–58
Image Credit: ©Seydou Keïta/SKPEAC/Courtesy Jean Pigozzi Collection of African Art Keïta, a photographer whose work is currently being surveyed by the Brooklyn Museum, was known for studio portraits that afforded his Malian subjects the ability to fashion themselves according to their own liking. In this photograph, a woman reclines in a pose that recalls the centuries-old tradition of the odalisque; whether knowingly or not, she subverts a European art convention that often rendered female subjects passive.
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Gavin Jantjes, Quietly at Tea, 1981
Image Credit: ©Gavin Jantjes/Courtesy Christie’s, London Jantjes, a South African artist who recently had a retrospective that stopped at the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, moved to London the year he made this painting. It’s meant as an allegory for how Africans were treated at the time in England, with a priest, a businessman, and a soldier shown engaged in deep conversation while a tipped-over African sculpture lies in the foreground.
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Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Twins, 1989
Image Credit: ©Rotimi Fani-Kayode/Courtesy Autograph ABP The beloved photographs of Nigerian-born, London-based artist Fani-Kayode, like the one featured here, often feature Black men and conjure fraught psychological states. He made this work in 1989, the year he died of AIDS-related complications.
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Yinka Shonibare, Girl/Boy, 1998
Image Credit: ©Yinka Shonibare, All Rights Reserved/2023 DACS/ARS, New York British artist Yinka Shonibare, who was raised in Nigeria, once said, “African fabric signifies African identity rather like American jeans (Levi’s) are an indicator of trendy youth culture.” Early sculptures such as this one questioned what exactly that fabric—which, in reality, was often made in Europe rather than Africa—really signified, flouting gender norms in the process.
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J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Mmon Mmon Edet Ubok, 1974
Image Credit: ©J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere/Courtesy Magnin-A, Paris The Nigerian-born photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere became widely known for documenting women’s hairstyles following Nigeria’s independence from British rule. This portrait, like many of other shots from this body of work, situates its sitter in a blank white space, removing her from any time period, and thus rendering her hairstyle timeless.
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Amadou Sanogo, Démarche du Singe, 2015
Image Credit: ©Amadou Sanogo Artist Amadou Sanogo often paints on cloth found at markets in his native Mali, and is known for spare figurations that are meant to “represent the relationships a person will have with himself, with his surroundings and with other people,” as he once told Elephant. “I distort them because we all have flaws: I can’t create perfect forms because they don’t exist.”
