Since its founding in 2014, AWARE: Archives of Women Artists has striven to highlight the role women artists have played throughout the history of art, documenting their presence and recontextualising the conditions around the evolution of their work and careers. The authors of this first chapter’s texts, Sule James and Nancy Dantas, work in a similar way, reconstituting the lost narratives of women artists. They revisit modern art history in Nigeria and Mozambique to unearth the stories and the work of women artists in the 1950s and 1960s. Through this, the authors articulate the voices of women in African art history whose narratives were in danger of being lost, due to colonial powers and their imposition of Western art historical discourse, but also by the male-dominated societies established in these postcolonial nations.

This endeavour first led both authors to rethink the very notion of modernist art. In his 1961 essay, “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg posited that art should become self-critical, that is, an artwork should become the purest expression of its medium without borrowing from other media. In this “purity,” modernist art would call attention only to itself as a sort of closed and self-referential art, able to “guarantee . . . its standards of quality as well as . . . its independence”¹ and therefore should be apolitical and separate from its context. Feminist art historians such as Griselda Pollock have since pointed out that modernist readings of art history have proven ineffective and insufficient when considering the artistic contributions of women artists and of racial and ethnic minorities. If this is the case, how are we to read the artistic expressions of African artists–specifically African women artists–practising during the late colonial and early postcolonial era? Can their art be so easily separated from their historical and social context? How can “modernism” be redefined to properly account for the work of modernist African women artists?

In the first text, Sule James presents the life and work of two Nigerian women artists, Afi Ekong and Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu. In his formal analysis of their work, James highlights their importance in the construction of African/Nigerian identity, particularly African womanhood, in the early postcolonial era. James chooses to look at three paintings from each of the artists for which there is no known critical analysis, aiming to transform the ways in which modernism is thought of, by introducing polycentric and political viewpoints. Through this approach, he aims to reinscribe the oeuvre of two women within the history of modern art and of African art.

In her text, Nancy Dantas explores the artistic practice of Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopes, through an analysis of photographs of the artist in her various studios as a signifier of her engagement with a “counter-modernist” discourse. As Dantas writes: “I see Lopes as a counter-modernist, a woman working not alone, but as a part of a wider underground, anti-colonial, and transnational movement in opposition to the debilitation effects of Euro-modernism, placing European painterly form at the service of the Mozambican vanguard, which I see as a (counter) modern gesture.” Dantas seeks to reveal how Lopes helped contribute to the construction of moçambicanidade, or Mozambicanness, as well as promote the importance of women’s roles within a newly independent Mozambican society.

This chapter contributes to opening the modern art discourse up to include those who had been previously left out by highlighting its limits when applied to non-Western contexts. As Dantas deftly points out, artists from Africa often used modernism to create a new expressive form and style unique to the newly independent nations.

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