Visual culture is a critical site where power, identity, and knowledge are negotiated. Within contemporary African art, materiality has emerged as a powerful means of challenging colonial and patriarchal constructions of Black womanhood. This study investigates how materiality functions as a strategy of structural resistance in selected works by Peju Alatise, Nike Davies-Okundaye, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Anchored primarily in Black Feminist Thought and supported by Visual Culture Theory, Materiality Theory, and Decolonial Theory, the study adopts a qualitative approach based on visual analysis and art-historical interpretation of Flying Girls, Liberal Women Protest March (Part I), and The Beautyful Ones. The analysis demonstrates that the selected artists reject the representation of the Black female body as a passive object by reconstructing it as a site of cultural memory, epistemic agency, and political intervention. Through the creative use of mixed media, indigenous visual languages, layered surfaces, colour systems, and compositional strategies, their works expose, negotiate, and resist the intersecting effects of gendered precarity within colonial, patriarchal, and global visual regimes. Although each artist advances a distinctive aesthetic philosophy, their practices collectively reposition contemporary Nigerian art as a decolonial mode of knowledge production. The study demonstrates that materiality functions as a decolonial epistemic strategy through which contemporary Nigerian women artists transform the Black female body into a site of structural resistance, cultural memory, and visual knowledge production. It therefore contributes to international scholarship on African visual culture, feminist art history, and decolonial aesthetics by establishing materiality as a critical framework for interpreting contemporary Nigerian women's artistic practice.
