ABOUT
“Turning the dialogue of contemporary art from and about Africa and its Diaspora on its axis.”
American Friends of Zeitz MOCAA (AFOZM) is a non-profit non-political organization aligned with
Zeitz MOCAA, the preeminent contemporary art museum on the African continent.
American Friends of Zeitz MOCAA (AFOZM) was founded in 2017 alongside Zeitz MOCAA's opening
in South Africa. Our mission is to advance contemporary art from and about Africa and its Diaspora.
We do this by advocating for and supporting African creativity and its production through our membership
and granting programs. We are Americans who support contemporary art from and about Africa.
PRESS
Museum Week, April 29, 2024
The role of the museum in raising the profile of African art. Interview with Claire Breukel, Head of Global Patron of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.
Pictured left: Claire Breukel and Zeitz MOCAA Partnership Manager Tiffany Andrews.
Art Newspaper, April 22, 2024
Over the past five years Kouoh has been turning around the fortunes of one of Africa's biggest museums, focusing on its collection, governance and funding streams.
CULTURED Magazine, April 16, 2024
As executive director of Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA, one of Africa’s largest museums, Koyo Kouoh not only shepherds the local art scene, but also determines which of the continent’s artists and artworks are elevated to the international stage. The curator—and founder of Dakar’s RAW Material Company residency and cultural center—arrived at the museum two years after its opening in 2017 and is largely credited with shaping its vital program and global resonance.
The New York Times, Aug 15, 2023
Since her arrival, Kouoh has emphasized solo retrospectives — Tracey Rose, Johannes Phokela, Mary Evans — which she describes as a pillar of her curatorial vision. “My generation of curators were informed and motivated by a strong desire to unearth as many stories as we could, and make them visible, and we all did those group shows,” she said. “But I believe there is a great lack of studying individual voices and how they speak to each other within and across generations.
Art News, April 20, 2023
The title of this exhibition at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town is a riff on Ava Duvernay’s 2019 Netflix series “When They See Us,” about the Central Park Five, a group of Black teenagers who in 1989 were falsely accused of murdering a white jogger, then exonerated 13 years later. Flipping the phrase to “When We See Us,” curators Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama signal an attempt to correct the negative bias through which Black life is seen—and written and spoken about. Across 200 paintings by 156 Black African and diasporic artists, whose works span the early 20th century up through 2022, the show asks a question with aesthetic, philosophical, political, and social implications: How have Blackness and Africanness been depicted?
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