In a world that too often dismisses African creativity as an afterthought, Koyo Kouoh made it the main event. Her sudden death at age 57 has stunned the art world, cutting short the life of a curator who didn’t just champion African art—she demanded its rightful place at the center of global culture. For someone whose work was all about seeing and showing, her departure has left the entire artistic community struggling to come to terms with a profound sense of loss.
Born in Cameroon and raised between Senegal and Switzerland, Kouoh was as global as the art she promoted. She began her career far from the limelight, working on the administrative side of exhibitions. But her eye was sharp, her vision bold, and her conviction unshakable: African artists deserved more than tokenistic slots in European biennales. They deserved institutions, infrastructure, and imagination. So, she built them.
In 2008, she founded RAW Material Company in Dakar, a laboratory for art, critical thought, and activism that quickly became a cultural lighthouse in West Africa. Through RAW, she nurtured a generation of artists, curators, and writers, turning Dakar into a reference point on the international art map. She also helped steer key global platforms, from Documenta in Germany to various international juries and exhibitions, always insisting that Africa not be an exotic appendix to global art, but a pulsating, driving force within it.
But it was her appointment in 2019 as the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town that marked her arrival on the biggest stage yet. The museum, already dubbed “Africa’s Tate Modern,” had struggled with questions of relevance, identity, and leadership. Kouoh transformed it. With intellectual rigor and political clarity, she reshaped its program, rooted it in African voices, and made it unapologetically pan-African.
Under her leadership, Zeitz MOCAA stopped being a shiny monument for tourists and started becoming a serious space for thinking and reckoning. She brought in works that addressed colonial memory, migration, gender, queerness, and ecological crisis—turning the museum into a live archive of Africa’s contemporary anxieties and aspirations. Her exhibitions didn’t just hang on walls. They questioned history, power, and even the institution itself.
Her curatorial style was defined by fearlessness. She wasn’t afraid to ask uncomfortable questions or feature work that made audiences uneasy. But beneath that toughness was a deeply collaborative spirit. Colleagues describe her as someone who lifted others up, who cared as much about mentorship as about masterpieces, and who always insisted that the African art world be as intellectually ambitious as it was politically relevant.
In 2023, Kouoh was tapped to curate the 2026 Venice Biennale—becoming the first African woman ever chosen to lead the world’s most prestigious art event. It was a historic moment, and one she met with grace and determination. She promised a Biennale that would reflect “the peripheries of power,” and many in the art world were already buzzing about how she would unsettle the Eurocentric frameworks that have long dominated the global scene.
But fate had other plans. Her death in early May came as a shock, with few details released to the public. What’s clear is that her passing has left a vacuum not just in African art, but in global cultural leadership. Tributes have poured in from Dakar to Berlin, from Cape Town to New York, each recognizing not only what she accomplished, but what she symbolized: a fierce belief that African stories, when told by Africans, could reshape the world.
And maybe that’s the hardest part. Kouoh had finally arrived at the moment where the world was listening, institutions were shifting, and African art was being written not in footnotes but in headlines. She was poised to make an indelible mark at Venice, not just as a curator, but as a cultural architect. Now that moment will be haunted by the absence of the very woman who made it possible.
Still, Kouoh’s legacy is larger than any single exhibition. It’s in the artists she believed in, the institutions she built, and the narratives she re-centered. And in an art world often obsessed with markets and trends, she reminded everyone that curation could be a political act, that beauty could be critical, and that Africa was never a subject to be studied—it was a voice to be heard. She left too soon, yes. But she left nothing unfinished.
