ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast


SALIF DIABAGATÉ, an artist here in this nation’s financial capital, stands by a pile of sodden debris outside his bungalow studio. He reaches for a bit of sticking-out cloth, gives it a tug, then pulls until he frees some canvas painted with symbols and words. He spreads it out, creased and dirty, on the ground.


“I made this to look like a traditional hunter’s shirt with amulets and talismans,” he says, pointing to small pouches sewn on the painting’s surface. “The soldiers must have thought it was dangerous. Bad magic.”


The soldiers were government troops who, a year earlier, had broken into the studio and bivouacked there when violence gripped Abidjan during the climax of a decade of civil war. Mr. Diabagaté, now in his early 40s, was in Berlin for a show when “the crisis,” as it is called, erupted. He couldn’t get back until it was over. By then the damage was done. The soldiers had burned his sculptures and dumped his paintings in the rain.


Could this one be salvaged? Probably not. He’d have to focus on making new work, though no one was buying. “Art is what you give up,” he says, “if you’re trying to hold on to cash.”


Even in stable times life can be hard for artists in West Africa. Not that art ever stops being made. Cities like Abidjan, Dakar in Senegal, and Bamako in Mali are saturated in it. Murals cover public walls and the sides of trucks and buses. Pottery, metalwork and weaving, in styles new and old, fill open-air markets. Portraits of jazzy beauties, Sufi saints and culture heroes (Che, Mandela, Obama, Madonna) are for sale everywhere.


But the elements that in the West make a healthy contemporary scene — galleries, museums, collectors, journals, critics and a steady, responsive audience — are in short supply. And the degree of isolation of individual artists from others across the continent and from art developments worldwide is almost inconceivable to an urban Westerner who takes instant global communication for granted.


Both despite and because of such isolation, local artist networks coalesce occasionally into tight and efficient collectives like Huit Facettes in Dakar, more often as loose affinity groups of fellow art students and friends. For a visitor, like this art critic on a monthlong trip in Africa, such groups can be difficult to find in cities that have nothing resembling art neighborhoods. But they’re there.


So are a few alternative spaces, conceived on a Western model, often with Western backing, like Raw Material Company in Dakar; Appartement 22 in Rabat, Morocco; and Zoma Contemporary Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Raw Material, run by Kuoho Koyo, a curator from Cameroon, encompasses a gallery, a library stocked with foreign catalogs and magazines, and a cafe-bar. It’s more than just an urbane hangout. You could practically live there.


And there is one large-scale mechanism for artists in West Africa to show their work: the broad, typically biennial surveys of new art. Bankrolled by government money — much of this comes from France, which still wields powerful cultural influence over its former colonies — these showcases are designed to grab global attention and bring in the larger art world.


Yet even in these ostensibly international forums Africa and its artists remain oddly set apart. The two oldest still-functioning events of this kind in Africa, Dak’Art in Senegal and the Photography Biennial in Bamako, are restricted to exhibiting primarily artists from this continent (or, rarely, foreign artists of African descent). Partly for that reason attendance stays small. From outside, these shows are seen as provincial; at home, they’re viewed as events for foreigners.


And whether they’re strong or weak — the 2011 Bamako biennial, in late fall, was strong, visually ambitious and cosmopolitan in its thinking — they suggest some basic questions about contemporary art here and across the continent.