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Gaya

There's a moment at every art fair when something completely takes your breath away and everything else seems to come to a standstill. At Art X Lagos last week, that moment happened in front of a painting on sanyan fabric (a traditional Yoruba textile your grandmother would recognize). Except the woman who painted it wasn't your grandmother. She was Nengi Omuku, and her work just made 700 people go quiet at once.

That's when we realized: we had been looking at art all day without asking who made it. Turns out, a lot of them were women. And their stories were as interesting as the paintings.

First, let's talk about the woman who made this entire conversation possible. You can't celebrate the artists without acknowledging the visionary who built the stage.

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/tokinipeterside/?hl=en">Tokini Peterside-Schwebig</a> looked at West Africa and said, "We need a global art fair." Then she built one. With a background in law and luxury marketing, she launched ART X Lagos and turned it into the platform for African creativity. But she didn't stop there, ART X Live! and the ART X Prize ensure the next generation gets their shot too. African art isn't having a moment. It's having a movement, and Tokini started it. We've never seen this level of global attention on African art, and she's the reason why. But Tokini didn't just build a fair, she built an ecosystem. One that's lifting up the next generation of creatives, many of them women, who are now commanding their own spotlight. Below are some of the artists who proved her vision right:&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/nengiomuku/?hl=en">Nengi Omuku</a> paints on your grandmother's fabric. Sanyan. Aso oke. The textiles reserved for special occasions? She's covering them in oil paint and exploring what it means to feel like an outsider. Trained at London's Slade School of Fine Art, her work has traveled from New York to London, asking one question over and over: how do we belong when we feel different?

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/temitayostudio/?hl=en">Temitayo Ogunbiyi</a> doesn't do canvases. She does entire environments. Born in Rochester, based in Nigeria, she turns urban spaces into emotional playgrounds where culture and history collide. Her installations take over rooms and rewrite how you move through them. Princeton-trained and globally exhibited, she's proving Nigerian contemporary art doesn't fit in a frame.

Kampala-based <a href="https://www.instagram.com/charlenekomuntale/?hl=en">Charlene Komuntale</a> works with embroidery, beading, and digital art to untangle what it means to navigate beauty, identity, and freedom as a Black woman. Her work feels like flipping through someone's private journal, intimate, vulnerable, universal. She's exploring the space between who we're told to be and who we're becoming. One stitch at a time.

French-Cameroonian artist <a href="https://www.instagram.com/_lauratolen/">Laura Tolen </a>takes old family photos and layers them into something surreal and haunting. Her question is simple but cuts deep: who gets to tell our stories? Her work is quiet but disruptive, making you look twice at the histories you thought you understood.

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/mouna_saboni/?hl=en">Mouna Saboni</a> doesn't stay still. Whether she’s in Palestine, Brazil, or Morocco, she travels with her camera, creating photo narratives about identity, memory, and place. With roots in Morocco and France, all her work circles back to the same question: how do we belong to the places that shape us?

For over 20 years, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/diagne_chanel_nuit_et_jour/?hl=en">Diagne Chanel </a>has been examining race, identity, and belonging in French society. Through exhibitions, children's books, and essays, she sparks conversations that cross generations and borders. Her work lives in dialogue, not silence.

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/modupeola.fadugba/">Modupeola Fadugba</a> has a background in engineering and economics. Now she makes beaded canvases and installations that examine justice, community, and broken systems. Her work is in museums worldwide because she proved something important: art doesn't just reflect the world. It can change it.

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/nikeartgallery/?hl=en">Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye</a> is the reason Adire exists on a global scale. A master textile artist and living legend, she's trained thousands of artists for free while preserving Yoruba dyeing traditions. Her work is in world-class collections, but her real masterpiece is in the generations she's empowered.

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/deborah_jayde/?hl=en">Deborah Segun</a> paints the female form in bold, Cubist-inspired fragments. Her figures tell the story of moving from self-doubt to self-acceptance, a visual diary of womanhood in progress. It's vibrant and emotional

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/sominwandu/?hl=en">Somi Nwandu</a> is an artist, curator, photographer, model, and cultural strategist. From the Smithsonian to Tom Ford, she's shaping Africa's new media landscape with one mission: culture, technology, and storytelling can connect us all. And she's doing it everywhere at once.

Nigerian-British artist <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ofunneazinge/">Ofunne Azinge</a> blends painting, photography, and personal archives into textured portraits of Black womanhood. Using a unique image-transfer technique, she creates work that functions as an ongoing archive, a space where Black women take up room, fully, powerfully, and unapologetically.

South African <a href="https://www.instagram.com/manyaku_mash/?hl=en">Manyaku Mashilo</a> works in collage and mixed media to explore ancestry and spirituality. Her work feels like a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds, mapping inner landscapes with bold, intuitive forms that pull you in.

London-based <a href="https://www.instagram.com/miranda_forrester/?hl=en">Miranda Forrester</a> paints through a queer Black feminist lens. Her transparent surfaces and fluid lines make her figures feel alive, intimate, in motion. She's challenging centuries of how women's bodies have been seen, creating scenes of queer tenderness that are soft, powerful, and revolutionary.

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/joylabinjo/?hl=en">Joy Labinjo</a> paints Black British life in vibrant, pattern-rich scenes inspired by family albums. Race. Belonging. Community. All explored through everyday moments bursting with color. From major exhibitions to her public commission at Brixton Station, she's become an essential voice in contemporary British art.

Nigerian-born, UK-based<a href="https://www.instagram.com/ugonnahosten/?hl=en"> Ugonna Hosten</a> works in collage and printmaking, drawing from Igbo spiritual traditions and mythology. Through a recurring female protagonist, she explores identity and pilgrimage in work that feels symbolic, layered, and almost mythical.

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/solaolulode/?hl=en">Sola Olulode</a> paints Black queer women and non-binary people in dreamy, textured scenes full of warmth. Working with natural dyes and pastels, she creates worlds of intimacy and connection. Her work celebrates queer love in its softest, most affirming form.

Zimbabwean <a href="https://zeitzmocaa.museum/artists/shalom-kufakwatenzi/?v=66e10e9ff65e">Shalom Kufakwatenzi</a> works with fabric, sculpture, and performance to create large, organic forms that challenge everything: medium, gender, representation. Her tactile compositions revisit cultural memory and storytelling through materials you wouldn't expect.

Nigerian painter <a href="https://www.instagram.com/victoriaoniosun/?hl=en">Oniosun Victoria Erioluwa </a>uses palette knives to create abstracted figures exploring mental health and emotional memory. She's not interested in exactness. She's interested in feeling. And her paintings invite you to find yourself in her simplified forms.

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/joyadejolaadeboye/?hl=en">Joy Adeboye</a> blends spirituality, emotion, and storytelling in paintings layered with symbols and poetic details. With a literature background, her work sits at the intersection of visual art and narrative depth, exploring how the mind and spirit process life.

Lagos-born <a href="https://www.instagram.com/victoriandubuisi_/?hl=en">Victoria Ndubuisi</a> has been drawing since childhood. Now she creates hyperrealist paintings often paired with poetry, giving voice to overlooked experiences. Her work is rooted in empathy, skill, and personal truth.

Senegal/Lebanon-based <a href="https://www.instagram.com/lindadouniar/?hl=en">Linda Dounia</a> works at the intersection of art, technology, and AI. She creates alternative realities that amplify marginalized perspectives, recognized on TIME's 100 most influential people in AI list. She's redefining what art and technology can build together.

British-Nigerian ceramicist <a href="https://www.instagram.com/baamtii/?hl=en">Ranti Bam</a> creates colorful, sculptural works that merge art with activism. She's worked with disenfranchised communities and feminist groups, and her pieces live in the V&amp;A and Brooklyn Museum. Art as object. Art as action.

Art X Lagos wasn't just an exhibition of pretty things. It was proof.

Proof that women are leading, creating and building futures we're only starting to imagine. Behind every piece that stopped you, made you feel something, made you pull out your phone, there was a woman with a story, a vision, a refusal to be ignored.

So next time you're at an art fair admiring the work, stop and ask who made it. Chances are, the woman behind the work is a masterpiece in her own right.

Everyone admired the art at Art X Lagos. But who made it? We went backstage to meet the women behind the paintings, sculptures, and viral moments.

Art & Design

She Painted That: The Women Behind Art X's Most Viral Moments

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