After Director’s Death, African Contemporary Art Museum Fills Role

Elvira Dyangani Ose, who directed Barcelona’s contemporary art museum, will succeed Koyo Kouoh at Zeitz MOCAA after she died suddenly last year from cancer.

Elvira Dyangani Ose, a Spanish art curator and museum director, has been appointed artistic director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), in Cape Town, South Africa, the institution announced Wednesday.

The museum, which opened in 2017 in renovated grain silos, is one of the largest institutions in Africa devoted to the continent’s contemporary art. It has established itself as a major global venue in the years since. But the sudden death last year of its executive director and chief curator, Koyo Kouoh, at age 57, left its future plans uncertain.

Like Kouoh, Dyangani Ose has global connections, having spent stretches of her career as a senior curator for Creative Time, the public arts organization in New York, and as a curator of international art at the Tate Modern in London. Until February, she was the director of Barcelona’s contemporary art museum, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).

In a statement, David Green OBE, a founder and chair of Zeitz MOCAA, said that Dyangani Ose’s appointment “reflects who we are as an institution — one rooted in Africa, while connected to the world.”

The museum’s other founder and chair, Jochen Zeitz, the German businessman and former Puma chief executive — for whom the museum is named — said in the statement that he felt that Dyangani Ose’s experience would build on the foundations laid in the museum’s first decade, as well as “expand the museum’s artistic ambition — across exhibitions, research, collections, public engagement and the way we work with artists and audiences.”

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On Oct. 1, Dyangani Ose will step into the position formerly held by Kouoh, who arrived at Zeitz MOCAA in 2019. Beloved by her colleagues and staff, Kouoh is widely credited with stabilizing a troubled institution and building programs that sought to bridge deeply entrenched social and class divisions in Cape Town.

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