Ouattara Watts was born in 1957 in Korhogo, Côte d’Ivoire. He has lived and worked in New York, USA, for nearly forty years.
A major figure in the visual arts of Africa and its diaspora, Ouattara Watts is regularly featured in international exhibitions such as the Dak'Art – Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain and the Venice Biennale. His work has been presented in landmark exhibitions including The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 at MoMA PS1 (2001, curated by Okwui Enwezor); the Whitney Biennial (2002); Body of Evidence at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. (2008); and Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002). More recently, his works were presented in the exhibition Paris Noir – Artistic Circulations and Decolonial Struggles, 1950–2000 at the Centre Pompidou (2025, curated by Alicia Knock), at the Espace Paul Rebeyrolle during the solo exhibition Résonances (2021), and at the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea, 2021, curated by Natasha Ginwala and Defne Ayas).
In 2018, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Abidjan, Dakar, Paris) organized his first solo exhibition in Côte d’Ivoire in thirty years, Before Looking at This Painting, Listen to It, and subsequently presented his works at the FIAC in 2019. The year 2020 marked the artist’s entry into the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, initiating a series of significant museum acquisitions that highlighted both his recent work and the artistic research conducted by Watts during the 1980s and 1990s. This recognition was accompanied by the publication of several monographic publications, including a book published by Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in partnership with Éditions EXB, which situates Watts’ career within a critical perspective at the crossroads of artistic scenes and geographies.
Ouattara Watts’ work is notably included in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (UC Berkeley, California, USA), the Cleveland Museum of Art (USA), Collection Compagnie Bancaire Helvétique (Geneva, Switzerland), Collection Gervanne + Matthias Leridon (France, South Africa), Collection Jom (Dakar, Senegal), Collection Société Générale de Banques de Côte d’Ivoire (Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire), Fondation H (Madagascar), Fondazione Golinelli (Bologna, Italy), Hess Art Collection (USA, Argentina, South Africa), the Hood Museum of Art(New Hampshire, USA), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University(Durham, North Carolina, USA), and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Washington, USA), as well as in numerous other collections and foundations worldwide.