From NewYorkTimes. Story by By Ginanne Brownell Mitic.

A growing number of sub­-Saharan African artists are realizing the importance and potency of technology — social media, apps, websites and online platforms — focused on the promotion and archiving of African contemporary art.

Smartphones, tablets and even satellite TV have also played a role, showing artists that despite the crushing lack of artistic infrastructure across the region — including few strong commercial and noncommercial art galleries, museums not focused on promoting and exhibiting contemporary art and a general lack of curatorial practice, artist residencies and good art schools — there are still ways to reach out and get the attention of art managers, critics, collectors and gallerists across the region and the world.

“There are people who are doing great things, but they have no galleries and no curators to look at and promote their work,” said Victor Ehikhamenor, a Nigerian artist who has a master’s degree in information technology. “But, say you apply for a residency. Most judges will look at your digital footprint, though they may not tell you that is how they checked your background. So in various ways that we cannot quantify, technology has helped the African artist, and has helped a whole lot of us on the continent be able to push out our work.”

While some artists have been lucky enough to be contacted by a gallery owner, other artists have been the ones reaching out. After uploading their works on Instagram and Twitter, they tag curators and art dealers whom they want to have a look at their work, hoping to make a connection.

Nkechi Bakare, who runs her Instagram account, “Art News Africa,” out of Lagos and has accumulated more than 86,000 followers since she started in 2014, said that every day she gets at least one message from artists asking her to review and post their work on her account.

Others get in contact over social media directly with art collectors and gallerists.

“We are seeing a lot of the Internet democratizing artistic conversations,” said Ayo Adeyinka, an art dealer and owner of the Tafeta Gallery near Oxford Circus in central London. “One artist, Babajide Olatunji, sent me a friend request on Facebook. If you send a request, I make a polite effort to check out your page, and I saw how talented he was.”

They exchanged messages and spoke about where Mr. Olatunji, a young Nigerian artist, wanted to go with his career. Impressed, Mr. Adeyinka took him on as an artist — brokering sales, introducing him to institutions, and managing press and public relations.

The Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey said that thanks to the Internet, where he posts his artistic productions on his Instagram account, he not only was offered — and took — the chance to study in Brazil but he also was contacted by one of his future collectors, who is based in California.

“I think technology helps African artists to reach many people in the global art space,” he said by email. “For example, I’ve been getting many residency opportunities from all over the world because people always see my work online.”

Thanks also to technology like smartphones and satellite television, there are an increasing number of artists who have become interested in examining international issues in their work.

“In the past what was inspiring was very local, but technology has afforded a new generation of artists the ability to tap into global issues,” said Lavinia Calza, who owns the ARTLabAfrica gallery in Nairobi.

One of her artists had been examining the immigration crisis in Europe in his new works, while another was tackling the effects of air pollution across the world.

There are also a growing number of online platforms — including art magazines, online galleries and research websites — that are also helping the overall promotion of African contemporary artists.

Contemporary And, a website based in Germany, is both a magazine about the art scene across the continent and a platform for research and networking.

“The original idea was that it was always important to make visible what was happening on the continent,” said Yvette Mutumba, a curator at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She, along with Julia Grosse, a journalist, founded Contemporary And in 2013.

They recently co-curated “Focus: African Perspectives — Spotlighting Artistic Practices of Global Contemporaries” at the Armory Show in New York.

Julie Taylor, a former Google executive living in Johannesburg, set up the online African art gallery Guns & Rain two years ago to promote artists from South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and her home country, Zimbabwe. She has mounted online exhibitions, including one with the South African artist Richard Penn, as well as one­night­only pop­up art shows, where she has used crowdfunding to raise money.

“Globally, art has moved online in a big way,” she said. “But despite that there are dozens of online art ventures, African contemporary art is still very much missing. I am trying to change that.”

The biggest problem with technology ­based ventures in Africa is that the infrastructure across the continent lags far behind that in other parts of the world. Rolling electricity blackouts are an issue, as is the fact that Internet penetration, at 28.6 percent, is lower than anywhere else in the world, with countries like Ethiopia — after Nigeria the second most populous country in Africa, with 94 million people — at just 3.7 percent.

“Things like uploading images take up a lot of time, and if the Internet keeps going down or the electricity keeps breaking — these are the kinds of obstacles we live with,” said Nana Oforiatta Ayim, a Ghanian writer and filmmaker whose Cultural Encyclopedia website project, funded by the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, was introduced at the end of last year.

“We need to remember the issues of the digital divide,” she said. “I am a massive fan of technology, but it is not a panacea.”

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