I have a problem.
It’s a very beautiful problem, and it lives on my coffee table. Or more accurately, it should live on my coffee table — once I actually have a forever home to put it in. Right now, I own six coffee table books and I’m white-knuckling my way past every bookshop window so I don’t add a seventh before I’ve properly settled down.
But here’s the thing: the decorative African books market right now? Absolutely stacked. We’re talking photography, art history, interior design, portraiture, textiles — all of it electric, all of it stunning, and all of it built around a visual storytelling and cultural weight that I genuinely haven’t seen anywhere else.
So yes. I have a list. A long one. And if I’m going down, you’re coming with me.
Jump to:
The 11 African Books at the Top of Our Decorating List
1. When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting
This is the book. A landmark survey of over 200 works by 161 artists from Africa and the African diaspora, organized around themes like sensuality, spirituality, and emancipation — exploring how Black painters have imagined and celebrated Black identity from the 1920s to today. Interspersed with specially commissioned poems and stories by writers including Maaza Mengiste, it’s as much a literary object as a visual one. One for the shelf and the conversation.
2. The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power
Writer and researcher Amy Sall started teaching a university course called “The African Gaze” in 2016 — and the demand for her syllabus was so overwhelming, she turned it into this book. A breathtaking deep-dive into postcolonial photography and cinema from Africa, featuring 280 photographs and profiles of 50 image-makers who reclaimed the camera as a tool of self-determination. From Malick Sidibé to Ousmane Sembène, this is pan-African visual culture at its most purposeful. Publishers Weekly called it “spellbinding.” I tend to agree.
3. The African Decor Edit
This one I already own. Ugandan-American designer Nasozi Kakembo travels through nine African countries, meeting the artisans behind 16 iconic heritage objects: Malian mudcloth, Moroccan rugs, Bolga baskets, Senufo stools, and more. Each artisan tells their own story, and the whole thing is wrapped in gorgeous layered interiors from around the world. Also a practical guide to ethical sourcing. The definitive Okanly-adjacent read.
4. How to Read African Textiles
Part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s acclaimed “How to Read” series, this compact but rich volume walks through 40 masterworks of African textile arts — from a 19th-century interior hanging from Sierra Leone to a contemporary canvas by Malagasy artist Joël Andrianomearisoa. Met curators Christine Giuntini and Jenny Peruski unpack the history, technique, and cultural meaning behind each work. If you love African indigo, kente, or mudcloth but want to understand them beyond aesthetics, start here.
5. Njideka Akunyili Crosby
The first-ever monograph on the internationally celebrated Nigerian-American painter — and it was worth the wait. Akunyili Crosby layers personal memory, Nigerian domestic life, and diasporic identity into richly textured compositions that feel both intimate and expansive. Published by David Zwirner Books in 2025, this is a serious art book that also happens to be strikingly beautiful on a shelf.
You May Also Like: 21 Exciting African Artists Who Are Changing the Game
6. Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II
The long-awaited follow-up to Muholi’s celebrated 2018 self-portrait series. Muholi continues photographing themselves across international locations, drawing on found objects and local materials to explore new personas — probing identity, Blackness, queerness, and the possibilities of self. Contributions from over ten poets and curators frame this as a meditation on speculative futures. Radical, powerful, and genuinely unlike anything else you’ll put on a shelf.
7. Omar Victor Diop
Dakar-born photographer Omar Victor Diop is one of the most visually arresting artists working today — and this monograph brings together his three defining series: Diaspora (2014), Liberty (2017), and Allegoria (2021). Costumed self-portraits, images of Black resistance, environmental allegories in saturated colour: each project is conceptually bold and visually spectacular. A collector’s object as much as a monograph.
8. Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens
Seydou Keïta ran a photography studio in Bamako, Mali from the late 1940s to the early 1960s — and the portraits he made there changed everything. Sitters arrived to present themselves boldly: patterned backdrops, props, cars, Vespas, the full fashion editorial. This publication accompanies a major Brooklyn Museum exhibition and draws on iconic prints and never-before-seen negatives gifted by the Keïta family. You practically feel the textures of the fabrics through the page.
9. African Art Now: 50 Pioneers Defining African Art for the Twenty-First Century
Want to get to know the current landscape of African contemporary art fast? This is it. Curator and British-Ghanaian writer Osei Bonsu profiles 50 artists on the rise — from established names like Tunji Adeniyi-Jones to emerging voices — with full-colour reproductions throughout. Engaging, accessible, and a genuinely useful reference for anyone building a collection or simply wanting to know what’s happening on the continent right now.
10. African Artists: From 1882 to Now
Phaidon’s encyclopaedic A-Z survey of over 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Africa — 140 years of creative output in one beautiful volume. Each artist gets an iconic work and a commissioned text by one of over 50 global experts. The alphabetical format makes for unexpected, wonderful juxtapositions. The New York Times said it works toward filling the gap in the Western record of the continent’s creative output. This is the coffee table book that starts conversations.
11. WAKA WAKA: Observations on Contemporary African Life, Culture & Landscapes
Three hundred photographs. Two decades of documentation. Nigerian visual storyteller Ernest Danjuma Enebi has spent his career capturing transformative moments across the continent — from intimate artist gatherings to everyday life — and this photobook is the extraordinary result. Bright, layered, authentic, and alive. The kind of book that just sits open on a table and draws everyone in.
Honourable Mentions: 5 Non-African Books We Also Love
These aren’t strictly African books — but they’re deeply connected to the same cultural world we love, and they belong on the shelf too.
Now You See Me: An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design
Charlene Prempeh has written the book that a century of Black designers deserved. Organized across fashion, architecture, and graphic design, it brings recognition to pioneers like Ann Lowe, Dapper Dan, and Francis Kéré — exploring how design functions as personal expression and political act.
By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter
Frank Walter (1926–2009) was an Antiguan artist and polymath who spent his life creating a staggeringly vast body of work — vividly coloured landscapes, portraits, abstract compositions — all on his own terms, largely in isolation. Edited by Hilton Als, this catalogue captures Walter’s intimate connection to landscape, place, and identity. It’s the kind of book that makes you feel like you’ve discovered someone extraordinary — because you have.
Danielle McKinney
Danielle McKinney’s paintings of Black women in quiet, intimate moments — reading, thinking, resting — have earned her a devoted global following. This debut monograph from Phaidon is unusual and personal: 50 paintings appear alongside 50 journal prompts written by her mother, Barbara McKinney, with blank pages at the back for your own responses. Part art book, part meditative practice. The paintings are small in scale and enormous in feeling.
Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door
Paula Wilson is a Black biracial artist working in rural New Mexico, and her practice — spanning printmaking, collage, painting, and installation — is as layered as her surroundings. This first major monograph documents nearly two decades of work, with essays by Taylor Renee Aldridge and Ebony G. Patterson. Screen-printed cover, richly textured, built to be touched. A bright and completely captivating object.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style
Published alongside a major Met exhibition, Superfine traces the legacy of Black dandyism across three centuries — from its origins during enslavement, through the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights, to today’s hip-hop aesthetics. Scholar Monica L. Miller organizes it around key characteristics of dandy style, and Tyler Mitchell contributes an arresting photo essay pairing historical garments with contemporary designers. Frederick Douglass, André Leon Talley, Virgil Abloh, Pharrell Williams. Magnificent.
How to Style Decorative Books Throughout Your Home
You’ve bought the books. Now what? Here’s how to actually use them — because nothing is sadder than a beautiful book hidden in a box or stacked somewhere you’ll forget about.
The Coffee Table
This is the classic move and it never gets old. Two stacked books next to a decor tray or propping up a sculptural bowl is endlessly elegant and surprisingly easy to get right. If you want more impact, try a book mosaic: arrange four, six, or nine books in a grid for a gallery-wall effect lying flat. It turns the table into a visual moment and also, conveniently, solves the problem of where to put your growing collection.
The Console Table
Two options here, both great. Lay books flat and stacked — without anything on top — so the covers do the talking. This works especially well for books with striking photography or bold typography. Alternatively, open a book on a book stand, fanned to a beautiful spread in the middle pages for symmetry. It invites people to pause, lean in, and engage.
Open Shelves
Books work in multiple directions on a shelf. Stand them upright facing outward at a slight angle for visibility. Bookend them between sculptural objects. Or lay them flat to create a platform — stack a beautiful ceramic bowl on top, and suddenly that stack of books is doing serious decorative work. Don’t just fill shelves; use them as a design tool.
The Showstoppers
For when you want a real moment: a book tower in a living room corner brings unexpected height and warmth to a transition space. But the move I’m most excited to try in my forever home? A wall showcase — rows of slim, narrow shelves mounted on the wall to display your full collection face-out. It’s part library, part gallery. Every book becomes a framed piece of art. When I have my walls, this is where my decorative African books are going. Every single one of them.
Ready to start your collection? Browse our curated list and pick the one that speaks to you first. (Warning: it will not be the only one.)
Read next: How Modern African Art and Design Redefine Exciting Spaces
