A gathering of
artists, techies &
sociologists.
Building movements
Our collective is made up of three initiatives; The Art of Afrika Fellowship, The Sociology of Design, and The Craft of Art Gallery . These three branches of our organisation support our core goal of simplifying the complex.
The Craft of Art Gallery is our visual and cultural sanctuary.
This space is dedicated to the radical exploration, preservation, and celebration of African art and craftsmanship. Visual aesthetics are becoming increasingly uniform, the gallery serves as an aesthetic battleground fighting against the algorithmic erasure of African art styles. As machine learning models and global tech platforms flatten visual culture into Eurocentric or homogenised aesthetics, African artistic expressions risk being marginalised, miscategorised, or diluted by the very software meant to connect us. Craft of Art Gallery actively counters this digital amnesia.
This series of artworks consists of 10 African folklore stories. We are exploring what it would look like to see the stories expressed in art styles from different African cultures. Exploring the different art styles has meant we’ve needed to learn new techniques and get out of our visual comfort zone. In doing this experiment, we’ve used Google Gemini's Nano Banana as a visual guide. Our first observation was the difficulty in requesting for African visual styles making us question the algorithmic makeup of the AI's learnings. We’ve experimented with the Zimbabwean style of Weya Art, South Africa’s Shweshwe and artists’ natural styles.
Follow along on insta @craftofart_gallery .
