The Discipline of Looking: Sunshine Alaibe on Taste, Inquiry, and the Ecosystem African Art Needs

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from having done the unglamorous work. Sunshine Alaibe, founder of Art Report Africa, in March 2026, closed the third edition of Lagos Gallery Weekend, the creative festival that gathers the city's galleries, artists, and the stakeholders who have quietly built its ecosystem. When she talks about art, she talks like someone who has spent years inside its machinery. Sunshine trained in art history, added a business degree, then returned to Lagos and went, in her words, knee-deep, working for gallerists, curators, collectors, and foundations. What emerged from that apprenticeship is a method, not a manifesto: a way of looking, and a conviction about what African art needs next. Sunshine Alaibe Ask her to define good taste and she resists the easy answer. "Good taste in art," she offers after a pause, "is being able to see beyond the surface; to identify, outside of what you can see, what is important to the piece you are encountering." It is a definition that puts the burden on the viewer rather than the object, and she is unsparing about what that burden entails. Stand in front of the work first, she advises. Look at the texture, the colour, the composition. If it is figurative, look at the face and ask who this person is, to you, and to the world the artist is working within. Only then reach for the curatorial text. What she refuses, gently but firmly, is the anxiety of not understanding. Art, she argues, does not always arrive carrying its own interpretation, and sometimes that is precisely the point. "Sometimes you're meant to look at it and be confused," she says. "It's that inquiry that is important to your experience." If an artist has gone through the labour of making something with intention, even intention you cannot immediately parse, the confusion is an invitation, not a failure. Being able to ask why is the reason you came. Aaron Kudi: Epistle To The Red Dust/©Adegbola Gallery This insistence on depth extends to how she thinks about the continent itself. Africa, she reminds us, is fifty-four countries too often flattened into a single narrative, and its art has become one of the few places where that…