Meet the 3 African artists shortlisted for the 2024 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize
The 3 African artists who made the list of the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize 2024 Finalist are Ozioma Onuzulike (Nigeria), Patrick Bongoy (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Ange Dakouo (Mali).
Last month, the LOEWE FOUNDATION—a foundation originally established as a private cultural foundation by Enrique Loewe Lynch in 1988 with the mission to promote creativity, educational programs and to safeguard heritage in the fields of poetry, dance, photography, art, and craft—revealed the 30 finalists for the 2024 edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize, an international award for contemporary craft.
Conceived by LOEWE creative director Jonathan Anderson to celebrate excellence, artistic merit, and innovation in modern craftsmanship, the annual Craft Prize was launched in 2016.
“After deliberations in Madrid, our Expert Panel has chosen the 30 finalists for the seventh edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize,” the announcement stated. “These 30 works selected by the expert panel will appear in the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize 2024 exhibition, hosted this spring in Paris.”
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With a €50,000 award for the winning entry, the prize aims to celebrate and support working artists whose talent, vision, and will to innovate promise to set a new standard for the future.
According to the announcement, this year’s finalists were chosen by a panel of experts from over 3,900 submissions by artisans representing 124 countries and regions. “The finalists, representing 16 countries and regions, work across a range of mediums including ceramics, woodwork, textiles, furniture, paper, basketry, glass, metal, jewellery, lacquer, and leather,” the announcement noted.
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Meet the 3 African finalists of the 2024 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize
The 3 African artists who made the list of the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize 2024 Finalists are Ozioma Onuzulike (Nigeria), Patrick Bongoy (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Ange Dakouo (Mali).
Ozioma Onuzulike
Ozioma Onuzulike, a ceramics artist, poet, and historian, is a Professor of ceramic art and African art history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His studio work has largely focused on the historical and sociological roots of the political and socio-economic turmoil in Africa and their debilitating effects on daily living on the continent.
Name of work: ‘Embroidered Royal Jumper for Peter Obi’
Category: Ceramics
Materials: Clay, ash glaze, recycled glass, engobe, copper wire
This ceramic tapestry has been constructed from thousands of handcrafted clay palm kernel shells, which are woven together using copper wire to resemble sumptuous West African textiles such as Akwete, Aso Oke and Kente. Each shell is bisque-fired, then selectively dipped into ash glazes, before being inlaid with glass from crushed recycled bottles. With the addition of glass, the shells resemble beads historically used as tokens to trade enslaved people, but now considered items of prestige and status in much of West Africa.
Patrick Bongoy
Patrick Bongoy, born in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1980, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa and moved to South Africa in 2013. Now based in Cape Town, Bongoy has built a multi-disciplinary practice whose central feature is his industrious and highly textural reuse of rubber from the inner tubes of tyres. Mixing this with other waste products such as hessian sacking, industrial packaging and textiles, he cuts and weaves his materials together to create complex, layered sculptures and three-dimensional reliefs. His painstaking process draws on traditional basket-making skills while referencing the physical labour that defines day-to-day life in the DRC.
Name of work: 'CY15'
Category: Textiles
Materials: Recycled rubber, inner tubes, silicone, metal valves, wire
Fine strands of thread, solidified in lacquer and gilded with gold, silver and tin using the Makie-technique, have been layered to create this work. The metallic coatings reflect the light with varying intensities to create a gentle sense of movement which is further enhanced by the undulating pattern of the strands. This work utilises a new technique, based on the historic kanshitsu dry lacquer tradition, but here instead of draping a single piece of cloth over a surface, many threads have been used, resulting in an object in which lacquer is integral to its structure rather than used solely as a finish.
Ange Dakouo
Ange Dakouo, born in Ivory Coast in 1990, holds a Master's degree in Plastic Arts from Conservatory of Multimedia Arts and Crafts of Bamako (Mali). He is Major of the 2017 promotion. Ange lives and works in Bamako, Mali, country origin of his family and is one of the founders of the Tim’Art collective with which he exhibits regularly.
Name of work: 'Harmony of Grigris'
Category: Textiles
Materials: Cardboard, newspaper, cotton thread, acrylic, cowrie shell
This textile work explores the practice of wearing personal protective amulets, often called gris-gris in West Africa. An array of gris-gris have been created using briquettes made from compressed cardboard. Each briquette is covered with newspaper in homage to the artist’s father who worked as a printer. The gris-gris, all of varying sizes, are assembled using cotton thread to create a lattice-like structure. Combined, they have the appearance of a patchwork tapestry. Shells, some encased in red thread, are also attached to the lattice. The artist stresses a spiritual dimension to the work, which acts as a metaphor for the search for diversity and harmony.
Other finalists include Andres Anza, Debaroun, Norman Weber, Kazuhiro Toyama, Polly Adams Sutton, Saar Scheerlings, Luis Santos Montes, Ikuya Sagara, Weon Rhee, Aya Oki, Gaku Nakane, Alison Croney Moses, Kira Kim, Heechan Kim, Hiroshi Kaneyasu, Racso Jugarap, Ferne Jacobs, Yuefeng He, Raven Halfmoon, Kevin Grey, Karl Fritsch, Jeremy Frey, Ken Eastman, Eunmi Chun, Chun Tai Chen, Emmanuel boos and Miki Asai.
