The Coalition For Young African Artists (CYAA) is a pro bono initiative piloted by Bwo Art under its corporate social responsibility program. This initiative was created to support emerging artists working in Africa through free counseling. To launch CYAA, Bwo Art teamed up with actors of the art world who have a strong understanding of Africa and the art market. The main objective of this initiative is to provide critical feedback, sufficient information and insights to young artists evolving on the African continent, in order to help them navigate the art world and build a successful career.
We are in a time where contemporary art from Africa seems to draw more than ever the world’s attention, and through this program, we aim to help young artists have a more critical and comprehensive approach to the art world. Based on our observation, Africa does not have enough functional infrastructures and mature markets. This is why we want to bring our stone to the edifice, however modest it may be, by enlightening artists who may have questions surrounding their careers. These questions may be related to pricing, their artistic practices, artists’ rights, industry practices, career strategies or even the role of galleries. Based on our individual skills, training, experiences, and careers, we will try to guide them to the best of our abilities.
To accomplish this mission, our volunteer advisors will dedicate an hour of their time each month to their assigned artists (candidates). These candidates will have to complete and submit an application online. In this application, the candidates will be able to pick which volunteer advisor they would like to meet with virtually. During this one-hour exchange, the candidate will also have the freedom to choose how they would like the session to go. After the first session, a follow-up session will be scheduled two months later. Our volunteer advisors will be assigned a new candidate each, every month.
For the launch of this initiative, our pioneer team – which is bound to evolve over the course of the year – includes artists, Alexis Peskine, Emma Prempeh, and Solomon Adufah, as well as the co-founder of Bwo Art, art advisor, artist manager and curator, Brice Yonkeu.
If you are an artist interested in receiving counseling, please read about our team and complete our application
Meet the pioneer team
Alexis Peskine (b. 1979) is a mixed media artist born to a French-Russian father and an Afro-Brazilian mother. His signature works are large-scale mixed media ‘portraits’ of the African diaspora, which are rendered by hammering nails of different gauge, with pin-point accuracy, into wood stained with coffee and mud. By applying gold leaf to the nails he creates breathtaking composite images.
Peskine has been the recipient of many prestigious prizes including a Fulbright scholarship and Hennessy Black Masters Art Competition award. In the past decade, Peskine has worked with inner-city youth in France, Senegal and Brazil to create a number of monumental pieces. Major museums and collectors including Peggy Cooper Cafritz; Laurence Graff OBE; the New Britain Museum of American Art; The Harvard Art Fogg Museum; Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), have collected his works.
Solomon Adufah (b. 1988) is a multidisciplinary Ghanaian born artist currently living and practicing between the United States and Ghana. Adufah’s striking work depicts narratives and complexities of identity through cultural exchange and negotiates the social-historical paradigm of globalization in his home country and regions alike. Adufah employs inherited traditional painting themes yet carefully composed and accompanied by vibrantly colored backgrounds.
Adufah received his BFA from the University of Southern Illinois (SIUC) in 2017. He was awarded Bilder Art Scholarship and Rickert-Ziebold Trust; two of the highest prestigious awards offered in the arts at the institution. His work has exhibited at Southern Illinois Museum of African Art, Scope Art Basel, Art Africa Miami, and in public arts in Ghana. In 2017, he was published in New American painting, Edition 131. He exhibited his first international solo exhibition in Geneva. Through his Homeland Project started in 2014, Adufah has helped facilitate creative art workshops to support children in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda
Emma Prempeh (b. 1996) is a British artist with Ghanaian and Vincentian heritage based in London. Her practice explores a culmination of her thoughts and feelings relating to an existential narrative, tackling questions that are projected upon her reality; family ties, relationships between friends, lovers and fleeting connections. Her paintings project warm, darkened earthly tones, recalling feelings of nostalgia, loss, and intimacy. Partially defined figures and objects float freely through the space they inhabit, mystifying forms and shapes.
Prempeh studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London, graduating in 2019 winning the Alumno/SPACE Studio Bursary award for 2020. In 2019 she won 1st place for the Ingram Collection Purchase Prize and was a participating artist of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019. She exhibited her first international solo show In and Out of Time in Accra, Ghana in 2021. Prempeh is currently attending an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art under the LeverHulme Trust Arts Scholarship.
Brice Yonkeu is a co-founder of Bwo Art, art curator, art advisor, artist manager and lawyer. Alongside his business partner, Noelle M. Elhalaby, he decided to create Bwo Art, a company that promotes and supports contemporary Art from Africa by offering management services to artists and art advisory services to collectors worldwide. As a manager, he is in charge of finding opportunities for artists, handling their studio sales (whilst educating collectors), and providing strategic advises to help grow their markets and build long successful career
He holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in African Studies and a Master In Economic Law from the prestigious French institution Sciences Po Paris. Since starting Bwo Art, he has placed numerous works in public and private collections across the world, advised artists on gallery representation deals, and closed partnership deals with global brands. His passion for the African continent and Black talents is his driving force.