The Abidjan School of Fine Arts, like any national art institution, functions as a generator of artistic canons – both imposing and teaching established norms while providing a space for these canons to be challenged and reshaped. This article revisits the understudied institutional history of the Abidjan School, founded in 1962, through this lens. It explores how the School initially mirrored French academic traditions as a strategic means of asserting national prestige. However, thanks to the initiatives of UNESCO advisor Albert Botbol, the School became a critical site for the reimagination of Ivorian Indigenous identity, particularly through the emergence of the Vohou Vohou movement in the 1970s and 1980s. This movement, characterized by a rejection of European academic formalism and the embrace of Indigenous materials and spontaneous techniques, marked a critical departure from colonial influences and became emblematic of national sovereignty and postcolonial reassertion. Ultimately, this article questions the role of imitation in postcolonial schools.
