Celebrated Contemporary African Art Curator Bisi Silva Has Passed Away

A tree has fallen in the contemporary African art world.

Bisi Silva, independent curator and founder of the Lagos-based Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), lost her battle with cancer Tuesday, PM News Nigeriareports.

"With a deep sense of loss, we regret to announce the passing of our Founder and Artistic Director of Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Olabisi Silva who passed away on Tuesday 12 February 2019," Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, the CCA's associate curator announced in a statement.

Silva marked 25 years working in the arts in 2017. She founded the CCA in 2007—an independent organization providing a platform for the development, presentation and discussion of contemporary visual art and culture. The Center also emphasized and cultivated collaboration among artists, curators, writers theorists with national and international organizations—promoting the development of professional curatorship in Nigeria and in West Africa.

The CCA houses a collection of over 500 books, catalogues, journals and videos documenting Nigerian art and art from the continent, prioritizing rising new voices and building local histories of African art in living archives, Mail and Guardianadds.

As an independent curator, Silva served as artistic director at the 10th Bamako Encounters in Mali in 2015, co-curator of Senegal's Dak'Art Biennale in 2006 and juror at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

In 2010, she also founded Àsìkò—a pan-African, roaming art school with a mission to intergrate theory and practice, seeking to form new models for radical art education with models that will foster reflective art and make it relevant to local communities. It currently has seven chapters in six African cities.

"How can and do we move forward without the appropriate tools and systems for acquiring and disseminating knowledge? The same impetus that drove the founding of an art library at CCA, Lagos, was the catalyst for Àsìkò: to give access to information that could lead to meaningful dialogue, exchange and collaboration," Silva says of the art school in an interview with Frieze.

She was 57 years old.