Now in its second year, the Art Basel Awards recognizes the people and institutions shaping contemporary art's wider ecosystem — not only the artists making the work, but also the curators, patrons, and museums stewarding its circulation. This year's cohort spans 33 medalists across 9 categories, from Established and Emerging Artists to Cross-Disciplinary Creators, Curators, Patrons, and Museums & Institutions. Five of those categories include African practitioners, a reflection of an industry that has been steadily reorienting toward the continent for the better part of a decade.

Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa in 1970 and moved to the United States as a child, eventually settling in New York. Her large-scale, densely layered abstractions draw on maps, architectural drawings, and the visual residue of political upheaval, building paintings that read as much like archives of motion as finished compositions. In October 2023, her painting Untitled (2001) sold for $9.32 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong, setting a new auction record for an African-born artist. Six weeks later, Mehretu broke her own record: Walkers With the Dawn and Morning (2008) — named for a Langston Hughes poem and painted in response to Hurricane Katrina — sold for $10.7 million, a figure that has yet to be surpassed, even as African contemporary art has drawn record global attention since. She holds a MacArthur Fellowship and has had her work acquired by institutions including SFMOMA, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum, which organized her mid-career survey in 2019.

Carla Gueye was born in 1997 in Angoulême, France, to a family of Senegalese descent, and her practice sits at the intersection of sculpture and material research — working primarily in clay, lime, and laterite, materials with deep ties to West African building and ritual traditions. Her work is concerned with transculturality and the reclamation of partially silenced or confiscated histories, often returning to family memory and oral tradition as source material. She was included in the 36th São Paulo Biennale, curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and recently completed a moving collaborative tribute project connected to the late Senegalese sculptor Seyni Awa Camara, who passed away in January 2026.

Born in London to Nigerian parents and raised between London and the United States, Precious Okoyomon works across poetry, installation, and performance, often building environments populated by living, growing matter — kudzu vines, sugarcane, butterflies — that decay over the course of an exhibition. The work is frequently read through the lens of migration and the long ecological and emotional aftermath of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, though Okoyomon has resisted reducing it to a single message, describing the practice instead as an attempt to create space for grief, growth, and contradiction to coexist.

Sumayya Vally is the founder of Counterspace, a Johannesburg-based architectural practice she has described as dedicated to articulating hybrid identities through an African and Islamic lens, both indigenous and diasporic. In 2020, Counterspace was appointed to design the 20th Serpentine Pavilion in London, making Vally, then in her twenties, the youngest architect ever commissioned for the role. The pavilion drew on the erased and informal community spaces that have historically sustained London's diasporic communities — barbershops, places of worship, market stalls — translating them into a single architectural form. She has since directed the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah.

Azu Nwagbogu has spent two decades building infrastructure for African photography and contemporary art from Lagos, where he founded both the African Artists' Foundation and the LagosPhoto Festival, Nigeria's first international photography festival. In 2024, he curated Benin's inaugural pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a presentation closely tied to questions of restitution and the country's long campaign for the return of cultural objects taken during the colonial period. His curatorial practice has consistently centered the relationship between photographic representation and historical memory.

Founded in Berlin in 2009 by Cameroonian curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, SAVVY Contemporary built its early reputation on dismantling the hierarchy between Western and non-Western contemporary art, treating the two not as separate categories but as a single, interconnected conversation. Ndikung went on to serve as a curator-at-large for Documenta 14 and now directs Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt. SAVVY itself is currently led by executive co-directors Lema Sikod and Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, continuing the institution's run as one of Europe's most significant platforms for African and diasporic contemporary art.