THE POWER OF ART TO TRANSFORM
“Linda’s mission is to empower and enable other African artists and marginalized people to contribute to the digital world meaningfully.”
Linda Dounia is a trailblazer. Born and raised in Senegal, she is an incredibly talented artist and curator who uses her platform to decolonize art and design. Her practice is a conversation between physical and digital mediums – with AI – exploring how power is socially constructed and how its distribution has profound cultural repercussions.
She is a curator at SuperRare Labs, supporting curatorial initiatives focusing on diversity and inclusion. She has also curated exhibits with Zora, Refraction DAO, and the VERSEverse.
As an artist, her works have been exhibited at Art Basel Miami, The Dakar Biennale, Artsy NFT, Art X Lagos, Digital Art Fair Asia, and Art Dubai. She was also an inaugural resident of the VerticalCrypto Art Residency Program.
Linda founded CyberBaat in late 2021 as a DAO of African artists determined to correct how art from Africa is perceived and valued in the digital art space. The first significant AI collection from an African woman in the collective memory of cryptoart was published in April 2022 when Linda collaborated with Quantum Art. This examined discrimination in facial recognition technology and the lack of representation of non-Western perspectives in GAN-generated art.
“I just felt like it was relatively easy to create a lane of my own in web3 and find collectors interested in my work. I felt like there were artists equally as talented, if not more so, who were not able to have the same journey as me.”
Linda’s mission is to empower and enable other African artists and marginalized people to contribute to the digital world meaningfully.
At university, she studied for a biology degree but realized it wasn’t for her. “I realized that my whole life, my happy place had been when I draw or paint. I did a fair amount of that in school, and I stopped doing it when I got to college. So that’s when my sadness started,” she shares. She pivoted to a design course and became an interaction and visual designer.
Yet, she was not on the right path, it seemed. COVID-19 halted everything. She turned to painting and drawing while at home. It was then that a friend introduced her to the NFT space. “My friend asked, ‘What are you going to do with all this art?’” Linda says. When she learned about the blockchain, she immediately recognized its endless opportunities. Now, Linda almost exclusively sells her artwork via the blockchain.
Keep an eye out for this pioneer!
