The Black Artists You Missed at Art Basel Qatar 2026

It has been just over a week since Art Basel Qatar closed its doors in Doha, and the conversation is still going.

Most of it circles the same thing: how different it felt. No first-day sales announcements. No sprawling booth halls to power-walk through. Unlike every other Art Basel edition, Qatar limited galleries to solo presentations in an open-plan design across two venues in Msheireb Downtown Doha. One gallery, one artist. That was the rule.

As we heard on the ground, the format made it harder to close a sale quickly. Collectors could browse the fair but each gallery could only show one artist, which meant no safety net of multiple options in a single room. You either connected with the work in front of you or you moved on. What that created in place of quick transactions was the foundation for longer relationships between galleries, artists, and a Gulf collector base that is still being built. Most galleries we spoke to saw that as a worthwhile trade.

It helped that the economics were different too.

Booth fees were a fraction of what galleries pay at a standard Art Basel, with shipping subsidised by the Qatari government. This was intentional. Qatar has spent years building one of the most ambitious cultural infrastructures in the world and this fair was its latest move, designed to grow a market, not simply service one that already exists. “At other major art fairs the global majority is the minority,” said one advisor on the ground. “Here it is different.”This fair was not designed to service a market that already exists. It was designed to grow a new one.

We went with our own question: were Black artists part of this picture? Here is what we found.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Acquavella Galleries

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Acquavella’s director said they felt it important to exhibit the highest quality of art the gallery has to offer, and that given Basquiat’s influence on contemporary artists working across the Middle East and Africa, the presentation would be especially resonant with local collectors. They were right, but not just for those reasons. Seeing Basquiat in Doha, away from the mythology of the New York art world, the work just existed on its own terms. Which is how he always made it. Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, his presence here was a reminder that Blackness in art does not begin and end on the African continent. The Caribbean diaspora built as much of this canon as anywhere else.

El Anatsui

October Gallery, London

By most accounts the most celebrated living African artist in the world, the Ghanaian sculptor’s monumental tapestries woven from recycled bottle caps and aluminium have hung on the facades of the Royal Academy and the Venice Biennale. October Gallery brought Continents in Gestation (2024) to Doha, a work about transformation as both process and subject. The material is discarded. What it becomes stops people mid-stride. His pieces command seven figures at auction now. But that is not what stays with you.

Hugo McCloud

Sean Kelly Gallery

McCloud made Pollinated Migration specifically for this fair and that specificity shows. Working with single-use plastic cut, fused, and layered into surfaces richer and stranger than that description suggests, he turned to the date palm, a symbol of sustenance and cultural identity across the Gulf, and the agricultural workers whose hands shape its harvest. An African-American artist making work genuinely in conversation with the place it was shown, not simply placed inside it.

Pascale Marthine Tayou

Galleria Continua

Tayou has been one of the most consistently exhibited African artists on the international circuit for years, with work in MoMA and Tate Modern, and Poupée Pascale (Hybridation) (2023) is a reminder of why. The Cameroonian artist plays with cultural symbols and hybrid forms with a lightness that belies the depth underneath. The playfulness is the point.

Nari Ward

Lehmann Maupin

Born in Jamaica, based in Harlem for decades, Ward is exactly the kind of artist whose lineage gets flattened when Black art is spoken about as though it begins and ends on the African continent. The Caribbean diaspora is not a footnote. PRAISEWORTHY (2025), his new shoelace work making its public debut here, sees thousands of multicoloured laces woven into wall text that only becomes legible as you step back. The further away you stand, the clearer it gets. Alongside it, Balance Fountain, an antique barrel overflowing with silver shade cloth and oversized gold mango seeds, and copper panel works from his Still Livin’ series, surfaces etched with materials from his Harlem neighbourhood. Ward makes work about race, migration, community, and healing from materials that came from the street. Because they did.

Amir Nour (Estate)

Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai

Nour died in 2021 and his inclusion felt like the fair doing something quietly important. Born in Shendi, Sudan in 1936, he spent his career bridging minimalism and African sculptural tradition. Geometric forms in bronze, steel, and cement drawn from Nubian culture and the landscape of his birthplace, in conversation with Western modernism, not derived from it. He showed at MoMA PS1 and the Smithsonian. Underrecognised for most of his life, honestly. Lawrie Shabibi brought him to Doha. It was the right place to start correcting the record.

Black art is not a monolith and it never has been. It is Ghanaian and Cameroonian and Sudanese and Jamaican and Haitian and Puerto Rican and American, all at once. What made finding these artists in Doha significant is that the Gulf art market is still being written. The collectors are new, the relationships are new, and what gets seen in these early editions will shape what that market understands itself to value.