Something remarkable happened this past year. For the first time, an African artist, Ibrahim Mahama, was ranked number one in the ArtReview Power 100 for 2025, which identifies the most influential people in contemporary art. This calls for celebration. It calls for an appreciation of Mahama's work and what the recognition of his impact in today's art world means for African art and artists.As anyone familiar with the global contemporary art industry knows, the list, first published in 2002, has become the most anticipated platform for gauging significant shifts in the art world's who's who, from artists to curators, gallerists to collectors, and critics to scholars. Over the years, it has documented the emergence of African artists and curators, from their total absence in the early years to their increasingly routine inclusion among the world's top one hundred art-world personalities.Consider this. In 2004, only one African, or person of African descent, made the list: Thelma Golden at no. 68. In 2015, there were four (Okwui Enwezor 24, Steve McQueen 39, Theaster Gates 44, and Koyo Kouoh 96). In 2024, remarkably, thirty-three percent were from Africa, the African diaspora, and the Gulf States. In 2025, twelve continental Africans made the list, including Mahama at no. 1 and Wael Shawky at no. 4. Others include Julie Mehretu (13), Yinka Shonibare (14), Olúfémi O. Táíwò (20), John Akomfrah (27), Sammy Baloji (31), Azu Nwagbogu (45), Marie-Hélène Pereira (55), blaxTarlines (69), Liza Essers (71), and the Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (82). While there is no guarantee of more next year, the fact that Africa contributed over ten percent of the Power 100 in 2025 is no small feat, given where it was two decades ago. That it reflects changes, from Euro-American domination when the list began to the more diverse field today, including a significant number from the so-called Global South, is now an inalienable fact.No one who has followed Mahama's career should be surprised about his rise to the top of last year's Power 100 (he was no. 14 in 2024, and no. 6 in 2023). There are few artists anywhere in the world today whose work matches the formal and conceptual ambition of Mahama's. Already, as a graduate student at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, he audaciously wrapped buildings in Accra in jute sacking, normally used for bagging export-oriented cash crops, thus binding spaces freighted with cultural, social, and historical meaning with a material burdened with colonial and postcolonial economic and political significance. That he could, as a young artist, invest so much intellectual and imaginative energy in a material with very low aesthetic value, and at a scale that far exceeded the exhibitory capacity of any local gallery or art institution, left no one in doubt about the clarity and singularity of his artistic vision. In the years since, and especially following his tremendous installation Out of Bounds (2014–15) at Okwui Enwezor's 56th Venice Biennale, Mahama has demonstrated a consistent, extraordinary capacity for creating work of great power and originality. He does this, frequently, by massing old, used, discarded objects from his environment in ways that compel us to encounter anew material culture's embroilment with political, economic, and cultural systems that alienate or sublimate, organize or destabilize human society.Even so, the 2025 list highlights a truth that is no less significant. Only Liza Essers of the influential Johannesburg-based Goodman Gallery made the Power 100 as a gallerist/dealer. No Africa-based collector or director of a continental museum has ever made the list—except Kouoh, who already did as a curator, before her later appointment as the director of Cape Town's Zeitz MOCAA. One conclusion from this is that, despite African artists’ rising international visibility, the continent's art industry (galleries, museums, and primary and secondary markets) remains significantly weak and unable, or ill-positioned, to support its art and artists.While we must acknowledge the Eurocentric lens through which platforms like ArtReview Power 100 decide who makes their list, the fact that several artists, many of whom live on the continent, have broken through belies a still largely underdeveloped art industry that cannot yet robustly sustain the work of the continent's artists who are now celebrated internationally. The appalling fact, wherever you go on the continent, is that there are extremely few spaces—public or private—where one could routinely expect to encounter the work of any of the twelve African artists on the latest Power 100, or their continental peers of similar accomplishment. The need, therefore, for new spaces, environments, and infrastructure that can host, support, and cultivate publics for contemporary art inside Africa has never been more acute, and that is why the positive interventions of artists like Mahama are critical.The Power 100 citation for Mahama notes that he has distinguished himself among an increasing number of artists who strive to take control of the means of production and distribution. While it is not clear what distribution means in this context, there is no question that Mahama's establishment of the ambitious, sprawling Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art and the adjoining Red Clay Studio and Nkrumah Volini in his northern Ghanaian hometown of Tamale is incomparable in terms of scale and impact on the local community. He, in fact, has singlehandedly turned the agrarian town into an international art and culture destination. To witness the excitement of scores of visitors, especially children from the surrounding rural communities, in festive attire or school uniforms, participate in workshops and performances, or as they explore the vast displays of monumental art installations indoors and outside such as several disused airplanes and locomotive cars mounted on rail tracks, is to be reminded of what Suzi Gablik meant when she called for the reenchantment of art.1There is no doubt that Mahama's massive investment in art and cultural institutions in Tamale and Accra is an organic part of his artistic practice (he funds these projects from sales of his artwork). But he is also a new culture entrepreneur, in the sense of someone who is making possible resources needed for the art and cultural reanimation and education of members of his community. Certainly, there are a few other contemporary artists who have, in recent years, established what in many African cities are the only platforms for serious artistic activity and critical dialogues on local and international contemporary art. What Mahama has done, arguably more than any of his peers, is to enable the convening of truly diverse communities—the streetwise kids from the neighborhood, the contingent of high school children, art denizens from Copenhagen, and the traditional dance troupes from the Tamale region. For this alone, he deserved every accolade and major award he has received so far.
Chika Okeke-Agulu (Fri,) studied this question.