“The true African woman artist must be free to ride a freedom train that frees her from injustice and mental and spiritual oppression. At the same time, she must transmit her message to her people. Those who resist all forms of oppression feel a pain that can only be expressed by them.” Miranda Burney-Nicol, AKA Olayinka¹

Encountering fragments of forgotten accounts of the circulation of African visual artists in Europe, from the post-war period to the early days of independence, within a French cultural magazine, Le Musée vivant (The living museum, 1946–1969), is the starting point of this contribution. During this pivotal period, between empires and nations, Paris and London were two imperial cosmopolitan capitals where the political and cultural meaning of African emancipation was expressed polyphonically. The participation of African visual artists in these debates, through their aesthetic research and/or their trajectories, is considerably less known than that of intellectuals, writers and political figures. Moreover, the writing on these African visual modernities has so far focused on male figures, reducing the evocation of their female counterparts to “subtext”, to use Peju Layiwola’s term.²

I am interested in the radical aspirations of two women, Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and Miranda Burney-Nicol, who during their lifetimes strove to create their own visibility and self-determination in a world that barely gave them any opportunity to exist as African professional woman artists. Although elliptical, this fleeting presence of African artists in a French cultural magazine gives us an insight into the transnational network of ideas, social contacts and institutions within which these women had to professionally and politically negotiate. This exercise of reconstituting a narrative from scattered elements seeks not only to fill the gaps in Western art history but is also an opportunity to experiment with new interpretative frameworks and forms of site-specific writing. In this perspective, as early as 1999, in an essay about the situation of Nigerian women artists, Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, an African-Amercian art historian, posited the imperative of mobilising “an intertwined

theoretical framework built from elements of Black feminism and art history, essential for the inclusion of Black women in a new language of art history”.³ Thus, this contribution is part of a search for a critical discourse that centres on Black women artists,⁴ and draws on the critical literature of continental and diasporic Black feminisms.