Ghana/Senegal: Fatoumata Sy and Kwama Frigaux, Winners of the 2026 Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize

Senegalese artist Fatoumata Sy and Franco-Ghanaian artist Kwama Frigaux have won the 2026 Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize, an award dedicated to women visual artists in Africa and organized by Gallery 1957, in collaboration with the Institut Français du Sénégal.

As part of the prize, they will each receive a cash award of US$5,000. The Senegalese artist will undertake a three-month artist residency in Accra followed by a solo exhibition at Galerie Le Manège in Dakar, while the Ghanaian artist will undertake a three-month residency in Senegal (one month in Saint-Louis and two months in Dakar) followed by a solo show at Gallery 1957. The prize also covers their flights, the transportation of their artwork, their accommodations, and their art supplies.

The two winners were announced on Sunday, November 1, at Gallery 1957 in the heart of the Ghanaian capital as part of Accra Cultural Week, which took place from October 29 to November 2, 2026.

A visual artist, performer, and professor of visual arts education, Fatoumata Sy is a graduate of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar and holds a master’s degree in Art and Culture from the ISAC at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. For her, the act of painting is not merely manual or intellectual; it engages the entire body in a direct relationship with space and time. Through this approach, she explores the idea that a work of art lies not only in the final result but in the creative process itself: the tension of the gesture, the spontaneity of movement, and the fusion of the moment. Her signature style: creating works composed of paint and marked by the rusted imprint of iron to evoke a world in perpetual motion, destruction, and rebirth. Through her performances, she questions the relationship between control and letting go, intention and accident, body and matter.

Kwama Frigaux (born in 1993), for her part, collects the discarded items that populate our personal and collective lives—tempered glass, disposable plastic containers, aluminum food packaging, empty medication blister packs—to transform them into evocative objects that challenge us.

Collected, washed, painted, and assembled, these discarded items—which sometimes carry traumatic histories—are transformed into sculptures, luminescent rugs, malleable stained-glass pieces, and installations. In this exploration of light, the arrangement of colors plays off the translucent and opaque qualities of the materials. The process of cutting and assembling shifts our perspective on this waste and reimagines its future—a creative potential that evokes other objects, other possible uses and functions, and ones that are more restorative to the world around us.

Among the previous winners of this award is Theresah Ankomah (2025 winner), whose solo exhibition “The Lore of Care: Maternal Acts of Devotion” is on view at Gallery 1957 through December 5, 2026.