African Art in Basel since the 1970s: From Ethnographic Legacies to Contemporary Visibility
Basel in June is a choreography: curators in motion between museums, collectors tracing careful paths through booths, artists staging new work in rooms and on riverbanks. In 2025 that choreography altered its centre of gravity with Africa Basel, the city’s first fair dedicated entirely to African and diasporic contemporary art. Its arrival was not a rupture but an inflection point in a longer Basel story that runs from missionary archives and ethnographic museums to the present fair-week constellation. To see how we got here, we need to look before 1970—and then move forward with care.
Before the fair:
why Basel became an art city
Long before Art Basel launched in 1970, the city had assembled the ingredients of an art capital. The Kunsthalle Basel, established by the Basler Kunstverein in 1869 and opened in 1872, became a laboratory for contemporary exhibition practice and critical debate. The Kunstmuseum Basel traces its public origins to 1661, when the city and the University of Basel purchased the Amerbach Cabinet and made it accessible to the public—an early civic model for public art stewardship. Across town, the trade-fair grounds at Messeplatz—active since the late 19th century—gave Basel something rare in Europe: proven infrastructure for large-scale cultural gatherings.
Financially and symbolically, patron families anchored this ecosystem. Maja Sacher (1896–1989) founded the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation in 1933, creating a forward-looking collection that she entrusted to the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung in 1941 and that later underwrote Basel’s pioneering museum of contemporary art. In 1999, Maja Oeri established the Laurenz Foundation, which would enable Schaulager and support major institutional projects in the region. The Staechelin family’s collection, long intertwined with Basel’s museums, remains a touchstone for the city’s public-private model of cultural capital. Even the public proved itself a patron: in 1967 Basel voted to purchase two Picasso paintings for the Kunstmuseum—a referendum that entered civic legend.
Kunsthalle Basel. 2025. A European crucible for contemporary art since the 1870s.
Archives first:
Basel’s early frame for Africa
Basel’s connection to Africa runs through three institutions that preceded the contemporary turn. The Basel Mission—active since 1815 and reorganised under Mission 21 in 2001 (and legally transformed into a foundation in 2024)—produced vast archives from Ghana, Cameroon and elsewhere, shaping European knowledge of African societies through a missionary lens. The Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB), founded in 1971 by Carl Schlettwein, built a research library and publishing house focused on southern Africa and Namibia, later strengthened by the Carl Schlettwein Foundation in 1994. The University of Basel consolidated scholarship with the Zentrum für Afrikastudien Basel (ZASB), founded in 2001, coordinating Africa-related teaching and research and fostering exchange between university and city institutions.
A fourth anchor, the Museum der Kulturen Basel (MKB)—its institutional founding dated to 1893, with collection roots reaching to 1849—kept African objects in public view for more than a century, though typically through ethnographic rather than contemporary frames.¹³ Basler infrastructures thus made Africa visible in Basel early on, but mainly as something to be collected and classified rather than commissioned and curated.
1970s–1990s:
The rise of Art Basel, the marginality of African contemporary art
When Art Basel opened in 1970, founded by gallerists Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt, it quickly became the fair that defined the post-war market. Yet African contemporary art remained peripheral to that ascendency. In the city’s museums, “African art” largely continued to mean ethnography; on the fair floor, it meant rarity rather than contemporaneity. The pipelines—gallery representation, curatorial advocacy, collector demand—had not yet formed.
2000–2010’s:
Building the pipeline in Basel
The twenty-first century began to stitch those pipelines. The CAP Association (Basel) launched the CAP Prize—International Prize for Contemporary African Photography—in 2012, awarding five portfolios each year and bringing artists and works to Basel annually during the fair season. The IAF Basel – Festival for Contemporary Art emerged in this same ecology. By 2019 it was already in its eighth edition, anchoring a city-wide, public-space programme dedicated to artistic practices engaging the African continent and its diaspora.
Institutions also shifted. The Kunstmuseum Basel exhibited major artists including William Kentridge (South Africa) in 2019, signalling that the oldest public collection in the world was attentive to contemporary African voices. The cumulative effect was subtle but decisive: African art was present in Basel, not just around it.
CAP Prize winners’ installation. The CAP Prize (founded 2012) positioned contemporary African photography in Basel’s public eye at the IAF Basel 2021. Photo by Andreas Zimmermann Fotografie, 2021
2020’s:
From visibility to protagonism
In 2024, the Kunstmuseum Basel opened When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, curated by Koyo Kouoh (Cameroonian-Swiss curator and museum director) and Tandazani Dhlakama (Zimbabwian-born curator). The exhibition reframed Black figuration across Africa and the diaspora, making the museum a fulcrum of a wider European conversation about canons and visibility.
If the museum recalibration mattered symbolically, the other fairs in Basel emerged from the gravitational pull of Art Basel—and none has been more consequential for the city’s ecosystem than LISTE Art Fair Basel. Since 1996, LISTE has acted as Basel’s incubator for emerging galleries: a high-trust arena where risk-taking is expected, discoveries are made, and many participants ultimately graduate to the main fair. In that sense, LISTE doesn’t mirror museum programmes; it shapes tomorrow’s market conversation, including early European touchpoints for some African and diasporic practices—seeding collector literacy that later supports institutional visibility. Two decades on, photo basel (founded 2015) added a medium-specific platform keyed to the week’s collector traffic, often dovetailing with CAP Prize laureates and strengthening photography’s presence. In 2022, the Basel Social Club introduced a non-profit, social-format counterpoint that broadened June beyond booths into convivial, public settings—still timed to the Art Basel audience, but changing how that audience meets art. Within this Art Basel–made ecology, the case for a focused stage became clear. Africa Basel (2025) thus belongs to the genealogy of the parallel fair—market-facing and centre-stage—designed to render African and diasporic practices visible on their own terms.
Founded by Benjamin Füglister (Swiss cultural entrepreneur; founder of the CAP Prize) and Sven Eisenhut (Swiss art-fair entrepreneur; founder of photo basel, 2015). The new fair positioned African and diasporic contemporary art explicitly at the centre of Basel’s peak cultural moment—no longer as a sidebar, but as a defining presence in the city’s annual choreography.
Art Basel Conversations | When We See Us, A Century of Black Figuration in Painting
Tension as engine: market velocity and historical accountability
Basel’s art ecology today is powered by a productive tension. On one side, the fairs—Art Basel (1970), LISTE (1996), photo basel (2015), Africa Basel (2025)—accelerate circulation, capital and visibility. On the other, the archives and research infrastructures—Mission 21 (2001), BAB (1971), ZASB (2001), MKB (1893)—push for provenance research, collaboration and historical repair. The conversation between these two sides has sharpened: Mission 21’s 2024 transformation of the historic Basel Mission into a foundation underscores how even legacy institutions are restructuring to meet contemporary expectations of governance, transparency and partnership. The upshot is a city where commerce and memory increasingly speak to one another—and where African artists are no longer framed as ethnographic subjects but as contemporary protagonists, curators, interlocutors and peers.
Conclusion: the narrative turns, the centre holds
Basel’s story of African art is an arc: archives → ethnography → visibility → protagonism. The ingredients that made Basel an art city before 1970—public collections, exhibition infrastructure, collector families—also made space for the contemporary African presence to arrive, take root and lead. With Africa Basel in the mix, the city’s centre of gravity shifts again, not away from its history but through it. In this sense, the most compelling thing about Basel is not that it finally “includes” Africa; it is that the city’s institutions and publics are being rewritten by African contemporary art, and are beginning to recognise that this is the point.