Nigerian Modernism

To enter Tate Modern's Nigerian Modernism exhibition is to stand at the center of a village surrounded on all sides by a multitude of structures, each distinguishable from the next yet undoubtedly part of the whole. Together, they tell the story of a people who defy convention and upend easy categorization. Curated by Osei Bonsu and Bilal Akkouche, the exhibition celebrates the vast and varied practices of Nigerian and international artists working in Lagos, Ibadan, Zaria, and Enugu, as well as in London, Munich, and Paris, before and after the country's independence from British rule in 1960. Through key paintings, sculptures, textiles, and works on paper, we encounter artists who asserted their right to self-actualization through materiality, shape, and form.In the village, as in the exhibition, life takes its course, unfurling like an ever-moving river. Society flourishes, ideas are shaped, and a nation continues to define itself for itself. In the exhibition, this takes form through paintings, sculptures, a multitude of archival objects, and more. However, unlike a traditional precolonial Nigerian village, the enterprising role of women in influencing and stewarding society plays a much lesser role here. Just as the prominence of women's roles in Nigeria was a direct threat to the colonists but thrived during precolonial society, so was the literary education of Nigerians. European-educated Nigerians who engaged in history and philosophy often left universities with an abhorrent disdain for colonialism. Writers and artists such as Chinua Achebe, Demas Nwoko, Uche Okeke, and Wole Soyinka did much to inform the cultural and political aspirations of a people beset on either side by the restraints of a colonial society and the various tribal and ethnic traditions of Nigerian culture. Popular social movements such as Négritude, which began in Paris among Black intellectuals from France's colonies who rejected European rule, and the rise of Pan-Africanism that emerged toward the end of World War II influenced the consciousness of Nigeria's foremost artists during the heights of its modernist art movements.Regarding women's roles in shaping Nigerian modernism, we find traces of their contributions in the works of Ladi Kwali (1925–84), Nike Davies-Okundaye (b. 1951), Ndidi Dike (b. 1960), Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu (1921–96), and others. But for the many questions the exhibition answers it leaves a slew of others regarding conditions of colonization and cultural nationalism waiting to be resolved, revisited, and reimagined. Myriad artworks—massive wooden sculptures, traditional Yoruba textiles, colorful linocut prints, European-style paintings, and more—leave a trail for further inquiry. Just as each structure in a village compound plays a role in village life, each artwork in the exhibition tells the story of Nigeria's past and present, offering a roadmap for the infinite possibilities of its limitless future, if it chooses to embrace them.This review will highlight some of the key artists who came to prominence in the transformative decades before and after Nigeria's independence in 1960, while offering a perspective on the role women played in Nigeria's journey toward modernism through clay, textiles, and mixed media assemblages. These artists, among many others, led Nigeria's artistic innovations and shaped its role as a major influence in the development of modern art. They include the works of pioneers such as Aina Onabolu (1882–1963) and Ben Enwonwu (1917–94), both of whom studied in Nigeria and Europe and received international recognition early in their careers. The groundbreaking work of Ladi Kwali was given an entire room in the exhibition, the only woman artist to receive this platform to engage their work. The practice of Nike Davies-Okundaye, a prominent member of the Oshogbo School, engaged Yoruba traditions through textile art.1 The London-born Ndidi Dike, who, opting to study in Nigeria, emerged from the Nsukka School to become a voice of resonance through her painting and sculptural oeuvre.2 Additionally, I will engage with the peculiarities of gendered exclusion and highlight key luminary male artists who have left an indelible mark on Nigeria's turn toward modernism during the twentieth century.Today, the impending residue and result of nearly sixty years of British indirect rule continues to permeate and pollute Nigerian society to detrimental effects. However, in this exhibition glimpses of history offer moments of respite and pause. Recasting the canon, Nigerian Modernism expands definitions of modernism far removed from the clutches of narrowed miniscule Western views, providing fertile ground to explore the depths of Nigeria's critical role in shaping and reimaging modern art. Unlike functions of empire, which only work through oppression and force, never through peace or righteousness, Nigeria's modernistic interventions bear no claim to position themselves in hierarchal order above other forms of artistic expression. Instead, they lay bare the particularities, origins, and pluralities of works produced during and after colonial rule.In his seminal text, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, scholar, writer, curator, and cultural advocate Chika Okeke-Agulu, argues that prior to Nigerian independence, modernist thought in literature and visual arts functioned as a force for decolonization struggles and African liberation.3 In Nigerian Modernism, this is evinced through artworks that test the limits of cultural nationalism and the determinants of artistic and political sovereignty. Regarding his insistence on labeling the artworks “postcolonial modernism,” Okeke-Agulu states: For nearly two decades now, art history and visual cultural scholarship has seriously engaged the question of how this work by African (and Third World) artists fits into the narrative template of modernism, which is traditionally understood to be the aesthetic manifestation of Western modernity. . . . Years after decolonization . . . scholarship began . . . to consider the cultural implications of the sovereignties won by what would be known as the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Important work . . . sought to name, describe, and analyze the art, literature, and other forms of expression produced within a context of colonial and postcolonial modernity.4Viewing the exhibition using this framework we begin to draw parallels, make disparate connections, and reorient our understanding of the entrenched ties between art and politics, theory and practice, materiality and form. We are offered the unique and necessary opportunity to forget everything we think we know about modern art and its “isms” and avant-gardes “because that's a very European conceptual framework in which to situate these artists,” Bonsu remarked during a walkthrough of the exhibition, adding, “I would argue one of the really important things that emerges from this exhibition is a plurality of artistic cultures that extend the languages of modernism, and I think that resistance to be categorized is an inherently Nigerian position. If there's something this show is trying to do in terms of constituting a canon, it's really a canon that constantly needs to be revisited, revised, and challenged.”5Entering the exhibition's halls and walking through its corridors, one confronts a complex history. Nigerian Modernism is at once an invitation and an invocation. It is a meditation on spirituality and cultural resilience, a wayfinding path through the constructs of colonialism, the tenets of cultural nationalism, and the effects of gendered dissonances. We encounter a well-trodden path of old and new ideas, long-held cultural beliefs, and questions yet to be answered. We trouble the discomfort of nuanced perspectives and disparate responses to a rapidly changing environment made manifest through artistic kinship and difference, critical discourse, and expansive material interventions.Probing further investigation, Okeke-Agulu attests that in order to grasp the complexity of modern and contemporary African art during some of the defining decades of the twentieth century one must examine the “translations that brought modern art from the margins of cultural practice during the colonial period to the very center of debates about artistic subjectivity and cultural identity in the years after the attainment of political sovereignty.”6 In the same way that Nigerian artists have tirelessly worked to define themselves through art, film, literature, and music during colonial rule, we must do the same to recast the canon of modern art and Nigeria's contributions at its precipice by “thinking historically in the present.”7To think historically in the present is to contend with the complexities of the past while addressing the contemporary moment. Hence, the viewer discovers aesthetic movements and schools of thought that emerged to fashion a uniquely Nigerian style of contemporary art in the twentieth century. At the onset of the exhibition, the works of early modernists, who employed European techniques to subvert negative stereotypes of Africans, such as Aina Onabolu and the self-taught Akinola Lasekan (1916–72), are presented. Onabolu achieved this by rendering some of Nigeria's elite class in regal fashion, while Lasekan depicted more traditional aspects of Nigerian mythology. Illustrating this are two prominent works: Lasekan's Ajaka of Owo or Ajaka Owa (1944), a detailed watercolor on paper depicting a man hanging by a rope from the sky as a circle of men gaze up at him in wonderment, and Onabolu's Portrait of an African Man (1955), a detailed watercolor of a commanding man in traditional garb with an expressive face, who stares back at the viewer, as he leans casually on the back of a chair with his right hand. While the subject matter of each work is in contrast, the methods of employing European techniques bear mention. We begin at the onset of the exhibition to observe that modern art in Nigeria developed not is spite of but alongside, and as a result of, a confluence of external conditions that birthed new practices.Similarly, in the work of Ben Enwonwu, the first Nigerian artist to gain international recognition, we find an artist who was deeply impacted by external forces. In response to the experience of studying both at home and abroad, Enwonwu persisted in the development of a multidisciplinary oeuvre that highlighted the challenges of encountering Europe's undermining ideologies of Africans. A massive room in the exhibition, the largest in the show focusing on a single artist, contains the work of Enwonwu. Placed on a single platform and raised several inches above the ground on individual plinths, seven wooden sculptures, commissioned by the Daily Mirror in 1960, anchor the room. Lining the gallery walls on either side, the sculptures are flanked by two distinct series of works. From the front and to the left of the gallery, we see a continuation of his academic portraiture and landscape painting that comes out of European training, while on the right his expressive exploration of traditional Nigerian masquerade dances. Two Onitsha-Igbo masquerade dances, Agbogho Mmuo (Maiden Spirit) (1962), which celebrates femininity, and Ogolo (Male Spirit) (1987), highlighting masculinity, are illustrated through these two key artworks. In The Dancer (1962), an oil-painted depiction of a brightly adorned masquerade dancer, the figure appears to hover inches above ground, outfitted with a large, red-feathered headdress and elaborately patterned ceremonial clothing. In the scene of Ogolo, a single dancer dominates the foreground of the canvas, with hands and body in motion, while another stands away facing left, wearing a white face mask and large domed headpiece. A group of spectators watch the ceremonial scene pensively from behind.The exhibition presents the nuanced and varied experiences of artists forced to contend with the social and political ramifications of colonialism, who in doing so, birthed new art movements. Through its historical and conceptual framing, the exhibition argues that one cannot attempt to understand Nigeria's modernist artistic interventions without addressing the impacts of colonialism on Nigeria's society and, subsequently, its artists response to it.Bringing Okeke-Agulu's seminal work to the fore once again, in his review of Postcolonial Modernism, Okechukwu Nwafor, assistant professor of art history at Wesleyan University and formerly an associate professor at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria, where he taught art history and painting, states, “the wealth of material that this book provides for conceptually reorienting our understandings of modern Nigerian art and culture is unprecedented. . . . Okeke-Agulu's model of scholarship . . . stretches into other areas of cultural production such as literature and African political history and his book sometimes strikes the more curious reader as a work of African political or social history rather than art history.”8 It bears mentioning that before this densely informative 2015 work, no other African art history scholarship brought attention to the particularities of Nigeria's modern art movements in the years leading up to and after independence.Through the work of artists, movements, and schools of thought such as the formation of the Zaria Art Society, the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, the Oshogbo School, and the Nsukka School, we see the kinds of liberatory practices that stood in direct opposition to the colonial rule and education that was thrust upon Nigerians. While artists rejected the skewed and limiting structure of European education, they continuously rearticulated its praxis to develop entirely new approaches to artmaking.Not to be overlooked, modernism in Nigeria included the work of exceptionally talented women. While much of this history has remained dormant for decades, this long overdue exhibition highlights women who “built careers creating artworks to express a modern sense of autonomous Africanity.”9 To the discerning viewer, Nigerian Modernism successfully invites more questions than it answers. The result is an invitation for deeper, much needed, and long overdue scholarship. Questions abound as to why these women's contributions did not receive the same attention as their male counterparts when they were made at the same time. Colonialism, with its grave effects, was a key culprit in the lack of scholarship and mention of women's roles in modern art in Nigeria. As Bea Gassmann de Sousa states in the exhibition catalog, “Gendered oppression did not exist in pre-independence communities until it was introduced as ‘an arm of colonialism.’”10In her earthenware vessels, Kwali, considered the foremost Nigerian ceramicist of the twentieth century, we discover an artist who committed herself to the preservation of tradition, even after her encounters with European methods. The room dedicated to Kwali in Nigerian Modernism, painted in a soft dusty orange, places her large vessels in a circular arrangement, slightly elevated on a round platform, reminiscent of a potter's wheel. In a class all her own, Kwali became the first Nigerian female ceramicist to join the Abuja Pottery in international in the years that as her work and Europe and the between and in the of Kwali both techniques into her practice to new and works of art. We find and on and the in the exhibition, and with For her contributions to the of art, the Abuja Pottery was the Ladi Kwali Pottery in her two years before Nigerian independence, Uche and Demas (b. with other (b. and the Zaria Art Two years within of Nigeria's independence from British rule, Uche developed the of to their to their cultural and by European academic traditions in order to new of art In his artists in a new that is what we We must with the new Nigeria and work to her traditional for art or with our colonial . . . The very of our social life is deeply by this . . . We must not others to think for in our artistic life, art is life itself and our and experiences of the new society for a of old and from the Zaria Art Society left an indelible mark on its and of artists who came after such artist and work bears mention is Clara Etso A of Ugbodaga-Ngu was the first Nigerian and the first woman to become a professor at the Nigerian of and in and taught Uche and before the formation of the Zaria Art practice was by a of traditional art and the of for its unique aesthetic was once of in Nigeria. It was traditionally by women to their with in for important and Nsukka artists were to for its and These are in works such as the oil-painted Mmuo of the with its brightly and and in and in in which a large stands with its as a of materiality is in The The and painted massive the scene with African in traditional it are the that leading up to the of her contributions to modernism, artistic practice was by the and ideologies of Négritude, and using traditional and of expression that both and and while from While scholarship of her artistic practice and contributions to modernist art in Nigeria has the of her works in Nigerian Modernism highlights her contributions to the that were by her male counterparts during her Additionally, her works are not and this exhibition an opportunity for further and the possibilities of to more historical into her 1960), a painting the of women in the of where Ugbodaga-Ngu was each wearing a their in of and their as stand and in front of a in a The painting is by large of with soft We see this same of and in Yoruba where a in with her slightly to at a large vessels in and work of Nike Davies-Okundaye (b. and her in the School and the Mbari are of her insistence in the preservation of Yoruba culture through the Davies-Okundaye in the art of and her as with the work of Ladi Kwali, the of traditions is illustrated here. on her in the exhibition, Davies-Okundaye Nigeria, are many women who work in the but they are often considered I was very to see work at the Tate I was to see other female artists in the exhibition and only that more women will be included in is for her and produced by techniques to works include the of the (1987), The both made of with and World made of artwork the of and and the of Yoruba in works that often explore of culture and of as an artist in the independence, Ndidi Dike, in in 1960, from the of University of Nigeria, in and is part of the Nsukka School of artists who developed their visual using that were traditionally by women. The gendered of Nsukka artists is further by the of male part of the cultural to their identity and the two works by Dike included in the exhibition, her The of is made of and and and negative and the of Nigerian Modernism one questions how of modernism be and convention to new new definitions of are To enter the halls and of Nigerian Modernism is to bear to and that resonance Nigeria's past of artistic and As I the room of the exhibition, I find back where I The show not end so much as it back toward its by Nigerian artists of the twentieth century in their of artistic and political sovereignty. at the a for the show itself. To understand where we are we must know where we have As we we a are and as we engage in The of this exhibition in the and of the work it not the it takes in the not to a position but rather the schools of thought birthed before and after Nigerian independence an opportunity for further for new and perspectives to engage with the work of its artists, both and The exhibition each viewer the of have remained dormant for be brought into the contemporary to inform the present artists of Nigeria's past engage in its his of Bonsu states: Modernism is dedicated to the of Nigerian and who worked tirelessly to Nigerian art into international and their In the exhibition, we that what is is never It is through and within Nigerian Modernism that we home to we stand before our village to to and to our history and