Younousse Seye (also spelled Younouss Sèye) was born in 1940 in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Self-taught, she is Senegal’s first female contemporary artist and has been based in Dakar since her 1960s debut. Y. Seye attributes the development of her childhood art interest to assisting her mother, a textile dyer. In 1959, she completed training as a shorthand typist at the Institut Grandjean in Paris, and in 1962 took to painting after work. What began as a hobby turned into five years of self-guided study, as she developed a distinctive style of textile-like compositions, with a naturalist colour palette, and a trademark application of cowries.

Returning to Dakar in the late 1960s, Y. Seye worked as a hostess for the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN), the first in a series of twentieth-century state-sponsored Pan-African festivals. The experience of encountering intellectuals and art from across Africa and the diaspora inspired her to quit secretarial work in 1967 to pursue a professional artistic career. In the same year, a director she met at FESMAN – Ousmane Sembene – asked her to co-star in a film, Mandabi (The Money Order). The film was responsible for launching her career in cinema as well as in art, after a profile in Jeune Afrique praised both her acting and painting.

The piece caught the attention of the Minister for Culture, who invited Y. Seye to join the Senegalese delegation of artists at the 1969 Pan-African Festival in Algiers, the follow-up to FESMAN. There she won a UNESCO grant to fund a residency anywhere of her choosing, which she undertook in Ivory Coast in 1972. She later participated in the fourth and final Pan-African Festival (FESTAC) in Lagos in 1977. She also starred in two more films: Hier, Aujourd’hui, Demain(1968) by Costa Diagne, and Xala (1976) by Ousmane Sembene – cleverly decorating the set of the latter with her paintings.

The 1970s were halcyon years for Y. Seye, when her Pan-African themes attracted patrons like President Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Felix Houphoüet-Boigny of Ivory Coast, contributions to touring exhibitions like Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui (Paris, Grand Palais, 1974), as well as worldwide collectors. Her nature-derived colours and use of “African motifs” has led to the mistaken assumption that she belonged to the Dakar School. Instead, she remains preoccupied with female-gendered African symbology and aesthetic traditions: from abstract compositions reminiscent of textile design in La Danse des cauris (The Dance of Cowries, 1974), to her enduring fascination with cowries as “writing, thinking and aesthetic objects” that feature in women’s geomancy in Untitled (2017). Since the 1980s, Y. Seye has worked with reconstituted marble, carving and painting the surfaces in her search to “materialise movement in a texture that lasts with time.” In 1992 she exhibited in Dak’art and also served as the President of the International Association of Female Plastic Artists (Association Internationale des Femmes Plasticiennes). In the past two decades, she has continued to experiment with material and form, producing sculptures in wood and iron alongside marble paintings.