16: 6 Years On: Black Rock Senegal
September, 2025
It’s been about six years since 2019, when Kehinde Wiley founded Black Rock Senegal in Dakar. As the residency prepares for its sixth cycle (2025), it’s worth pausing to assess not just what’s been built — the buildings, studios, amenities — but what kinds of design, identity, and opportunity have emerged in its wake. Here’s a retrospective look at how Black Rock has shifted the creative landscape, opened new spaces (literally and figuratively), and what tensions and possibilities still remain.
A Quick Refresher
Founded in 2019 by Kehinde Wiley.
Offers 1- to 3-month residencies to international artists (writers, filmmakers, visual artists).
Designed by Senegalese architect Abib Djenne, with interiors partly by Wiley + local designers such as Fatiya Djenne and Aissa Dione.
“Black Rock” refers to the volcanic rocks along the coastline near Yoff Bay; the site is meant to integrate with the environment, light, and landscape.
What Has Emerged: Ripples in Design, Creative Geography, & Culture
A Reframing of Creative Geography
Black Rock offers an “outside the West” base of operations. Artists who might normally be filtered through Western residencies or institutions have this grounded alternative in West Africa, one that shifts the notion of power: the idea that creative legitimacy always requires Western validation.
Local Craft & Material Culture More Central
The materials, trade crafts, and designers of Senegal (and the region) are not just decorative or backdrops, but active collaborators. Residents engage with local textile practices (weaving, design), with local makers, and with traditions. That means design that is hybrid: global sensibilities meeting the specificity of place.
Elevated Living & Amenities as Part of Creative Design
One of the striking things is how Black Rock treats “luxury” or “comfort” not as an afterthought or indulgence, but as part of what design means in a residency. Private studios that open to the ocean, architecture that balances privacy and communal spaces; high-quality finishes; landscaping, gardens, and views. The design of the residency itself becomes part of the creative experience.
Diasporic and Transnational Relations
The space helps bridge artists of various origins — African, African diaspora, global — around shared interests in identity, place, and history. Black Rock works as a site of encounter. Artists coming from the diaspora benefit not only from being physically on the continent but also from becoming part of a conversation rooted in African aesthetics, politics, craft, and landscape.
Institutional & Cultural Impact
The number of applicants has risen each year, signaling growing awareness and demand.
Alumni and current residents are showing work in Dakar (including in major events like Dak’Art Biennale) and beyond.
There are public programs, talks, and exhibitions tied to the Residency, helping it to exist not only as a secluded compound but as one node in the life of Dakar and West African contemporary culture.
Why This Matters Moving Forward
Setting a standard: Black Rock has become a reference point for what high-quality creative infrastructure in Africa can look like. It influences emerging residencies, cultural institutions, and public policy.
Design as decolonizing practice: It’s part of a broader wave: reclaiming design, architecture, spaces from colonial logics (imported models, tropical exotica, etc.), instead insisting on African legacies, landscapes, materiality.
Cultural ecosystems: Residencies like Black Rock can be keystones: helping generational change, forming networks, fostering mentorship, teaching crafts, regenerating practices.
Imagining futures: As Africa’s creative economies grow, the models that Black Rock develops (of luxury, global connection, rootedness) suggest new possibilities: for fashion, design, architecture, performance, literature.
Here are some standout alumni whose work, presence, or story helps illuminate what Black Rock has opened up, along with their IG handles:
A painter originally from London, now works and exhibits internationally. He was among the early cohorts.
Known for powerful portraiture centering Black women; several solo/group shows; brings myth, ritual, and texture into her painting practice.
Unusual surface materials form an important part of Kimeze’s practice, which she uses to explore how texture and luminosity help to investigate themes of interiority, oneness, and belonging.
Conclusion
Six years since its opening, Black Rock Senegal isn’t just a residency—it is a design space in the fullest sense: shaped by architecture, by social structure, by material culture, by ecology, by histories of diaspora and locality. It marks a turning point: not simply to be seen among residencies, but to help redefine what residencies do, where they can be, who they serve, and how design (in its many forms) lives.
If you like, I can prepare a version of this editorial tailored for local Senegalese creatives or explore some individual alumni stories to illustrate these themes more concretely.