"No one in the village had ever seen statues like mine."
Seyni Awa Camara (c. 1945, Casamance, Senegal - 25 January 2026, Bignona) was born into a lineage of potters in the Ziguinchor region, a Jola woman whose exact birth date, like much of her story, remains suspended between record and legend. Raised by her mother, a traditional potter who taught her to work clay as a child, she was, according to the story long told around her, one of triplets who disappeared into the forests of Casamance at the age of twelve and returned months later knowing how to sculpt, sheltered by God's spirits who taught them to work with clay. Scholars and those who knew her, including the filmmaker Fatou Kandé Senghor, have read that legend as a narrative shaped for Western audiences, pointing instead to the maternal transmission at the root of her art; both accounts belong to her myth, and Camara herself moved freely between them, guided in her work by dreams, visions and revealed truths.
What is beyond dispute is that she broke every boundary of the utilitarian pottery she inherited. In her tin-roofed compound in Bignona, which visitors described as a theatre without a stage, she modelled unglazed terracotta figures from thirty centimetres to two metres and forty in height: mothers with swollen torsos covered in dozens of small beings, many-breasted and multi-limbed bodies, heads emerging from heads, hybrid creatures at the threshold between the human, the ancestral and the divine. Fired in the open air on fires of palm wood and coated with macerated vegetal extracts that gave them their deep, dark patina, her sculptures drew on maternity, marriage, spirituality and loss, at the crossing of Jola animist belief and her own Muslim faith, and on the most intimate experiences of her life as a woman. Her community, it was said, both revered and feared them.
Camara's international recognition began with "Magiciens de la Terre" at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris (1989), the exhibition that presented her terracottas to the world; the documentary "Magicians of the Earth" by Philip Haas (1990) and, much later, "Giving Birth" by Fatou Kandé Senghor, presented at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), recounted her work on film. Invited by Harald Szeemann, she took part in the 49th Venice Biennale, "Plateau of Humankind" (2001), and her work featured in "Africa Hoy/Africa Now" (1991-1992), "African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi Collection" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005-2006), "100% Africa" at the Guggenheim Bilbao, "Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier" at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017), "Alpha Crucis" at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2020), and "Ex-Africa" at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris (2021). In her final years her work entered an extraordinary season of recognition: the dialogue with Louise Bourgeois in "Imaginary Conversations" at the National Museum, Oslo (2023), the solo exhibition "The Divine Theatre of Seyni Awa Camara" at The Gallery of Everything, London (2024), the exhibitions at Baronian, Brussels, and MAGNIN-A, Paris, "Femmes" at Perrotin, Paris, curated by Pharrell Williams (2025), and "Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica" at the Art Institute of Chicago and MACBA, Barcelona (2024-2026). In Italy, Black Liquid Art Gallery, Rome, presented the two-person exhibition "Soly Cissé and Seyni Awa Camara" (2024-2025), among her final European gallery exhibitions. She takes part posthumously in the 61st Venice Biennale, "In Minor Keys" (2026). Her works are held in the Contemporary African Art Collection of Jean Pigozzi, the Collection Zinsou and the Fondation Blachère, among others.