ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses modern African artists who studied in Paris at important points in their careers and how they negotiated blackness and African identities within global contexts of modern art. Focusing on Aina Onabolu, Gerard Sekoto, Gazbia Sirry, and Iba Ndiaye, it argues that France’s colonial history and the activities of African artists in the city make Paris important to the discourse of modern African art. It analyzes the kinds of art training they received and how their interaction with various European artists in Paris maps their involvement in modernist discourses. Modern African art’s cosmopolitan orientation and its deployment of visual languages of modernism framed the international reception of these artists, all of whom emerged from cosmopolitan urban centers in Africa. New interpretative frameworks are needed to define their works as platforms for the expression of intent, action, and intellectual engagement in the global contexts of modernism.
