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Recent years have seen renewed public discourse about the colonial origins of many historical African art collections. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western collectors’ access to African artworks was often directly facilitated by European colonial interventions across the African continent. This history continues to pose major ethical and methodological questions for art historians, not least of which is the discursive erasure of individual African artists. By attributing authorship to entire ethnic groups rather than specific, named artists, colonial collectors perpetuated an essentialist view of “traditional” African art, as both anonymous and ahistorical. By the same token, European modernists famously celebrated African sculptures while refusing to truly credit the people who made them, in ways that foreshadow ongoing dynamics of cultural appropriation today. In light of these historical legacies, this panel asks how we might revisit the story of Western collection of African art under colonialism: specifically, how might this narrative be revised to more fully acknowledge the agency and creativity of African artists within this historical exchange? This panel welcomes papers that engage any facet of this overarching question. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: historical relationships between African artists and European colonial patrons; historical African artists’ responses to the commodification of African sculpture during the colonial era; works by contemporary African artists that propose fresh modes of engagement with colonial collections and archives; or contemporary African and diasporic artists’ engagement with ongoing conversations about repatriation and cultural heritage.