JOOPITER announces Black Vanguard, the latest auction in its Contemporary Take series, focused on artists from Africa and the African diaspora whose work shapes global contemporary art today. The sale spans painting, photography, and textiles, bringing together artists who work across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. JOOPITER developed the sale with Elikem Logan, a Ghanaian art historian, writer, and former Sotheby’s specialist in African Modern and Contemporary Art.
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Black Vanguard looks at a moment shaped by a new generation of Black contemporary artists. Earlier artists from Africa and the diaspora expanded the global map of contemporary art and gained major institutional recognition at Tate Modern, MoMA, and the Venice Biennale. A younger cohort now enters the center of the conversation, with names such as Slawn, Otis Quaicoe, and Soldier forming part of that shift. The auction argues for the art-historical weight of this moment and gives the works the level of attention their market position now demands.
The sale also expands the conversation around Black contemporary art beyond figuration. Abdoulaye Konaté, born in Mali in 1953, works entirely in textile, with Coccinelle No. 1 turning dyed and woven fabric into a color field composition rooted in West African craft. Caroline Kent, born in Illinois in 1975, creates paintings that operate like alternative languages, using shapes that suggest meaning while resisting fixed interpretation. Samuel Ross, the British designer and artist who founded A-Cold-Wall*, brings an industrial form of abstraction shaped by working-class British experience.
Several auction highlights sharpen that argument. Slawn and Opake’s The Ol’ Ball and Chain, executed in 2025, uses spray paint and acrylic paint marker on maple wood to bring graffiti, caricature, street culture, and graphic figuration into one raw composition. Soldier’s Dube With His Passport, executed in 2026, uses oil on canvas to address migration, identity, aspiration, and the experiences of contemporary African youth through a restrained portrait centered on mobility and uncertainty. Ross’s 7 HOURS, executed in 2022, combines emulsion, acrylic, oil, masonry paint, aerosol, Indian ink, and fabric dye on soaked duck canvas, with a surface shaped by accumulation, erosion, labor, and material force.
Konaté’s Coccinelle No. 1, executed in 2022, builds a layered textile field from soft pink to deep burgundy tones, with a single ladybug adding a quiet symbolic note. Che Lovelace’s Shanna and Sita, executed in 2021, brings Caribbean life, ritual, fruit, and intimate exchange into acrylic and dry pigment on board. Salah Elmur’s Innocent Prisoner No. 12, executed in 2020, centers a solitary figure through flattened perspective, saturated color, and symbolic narrative. Nina Chanel Abney’s Temporary Friends, a 2019 set of five relief prints, turns sacred archetypes into contemporary Black devotional portraits through sharp color, flat forms, and layered social commentary.
Logan describes the generation in Black Vanguard as artists who expand the idea of Black contemporary art through work made on their own terms. He notes that earlier African and diasporic artists gained institutional recognition and changed critical frameworks. This sale focuses on artists who now negotiate the future of Black art through material, image, form, and lived experience. The Contemporary Take: Black Vanguard opens for browsing now at JOOPITER website, with global bidding running from June 9 to 18, 2026.
