Following the life and career of Younousse Seye, one of Senegal’s first female contemporary artist, this forthcoming feature documentary examines the contingencies that govern Black women artists’ remembrance… and resurgence.
Born in 1940 under French colonial rule, Seye emerged as a transdisciplinary artist working across oil, marble, steel, iron, wood, and cinema. In the 1960s, she co-starred in the first films to ever be made in an African language. By the 1970s, she achieved international stardom during the peak of Black and feminist liberation movements.
Her exhibitions spanned continents—from Europe to Asia— and she counted world leaders among her collectors, all while socializing with luminaries like, Wole Soyinka, Mariam Makeba, Kwame Ture and Leopold Senghor. Yet at 85, unlike her contemporaries who entered the artistic pantheon, Seye remains largely forgotten.
THE AGE OF ALL WOMEN questions how even fame fails to protect against erasure? Seye's story exposes the structural mechanisms within the international art market that dictate whose work endures, demolishing simple narratives of "invisibility" typically used to explain Black women's absence from cultural memory.
How will Seye reckon with systems that once sidelined her?
