africa art

Global Contemporary NIGERIA

Uche Okeke Natural Synthesis

and the Zaria Art Society

Uli body and mural painting (Igbo ethnic group)

Olu Oguibe (article on Blackboard)

Focus: El Anatsui

Yinka Shonibare Sokari Douglas Camp

"Young artists in a new nation, that is what we are! We must grow with the new Nigeria and work to satisfy her traditional love for art or perish with our colonial past." —Uche Okeke, from the "Zaria Art Society Manifesto," Natural Synthesis, 1960

Uli designs

Uche Okeke was Igbo from SE Nigeria who went

to art school in Zaria, northern Nigeria, before returning to his home to

Enugu, where he established a cultural center called Mbari.

1967-1970 Nigeria suffered from a brutal civil war (the

Biafran war) when Igbo peoples and their

neighbors from SE Nigeria sought independence from the Nigerian state. As many as 2 million people died of

starvation, a huge humanitarian crisis.

After the war, Okeke joined the faculty at the University of Nigeria-

Nsukka, where he led a revival of interest in the

Igbo artform known as uli.

• Zaria

• Nsukka

Nigeria is one of the most populous countries in Africa, approaching 200 million in 2020.

An Ozo titled man with his wife on the day of his

installation, Agwa, 1983. Photo by Herbert M. Cole.

Uli is a historically ephemeral form of mural and body painting practiced predominantly by female artists in Igbo-speaking regions of southeastern Nigeria. Once very common in southeastern Nigeria, Uli body and mural painting were used in different contexts depending on the region. In some areas, commissioned artists painted shrines annually for local festivals. In other areas, artists painted their own homes or compound walls in honor of specific events, such as title takings or weddings. (https://africa.si.edu/ exhibits/inscribing/object.html)

Uli body designs from Awka District, collected by W.B. Yeatman c. 1933 (Pitt-Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

uli body painting

Uli shrine paintings

Uli artist Agbaejije Anunobi creating a mural on an obi, a men's meetinghouse Photograph by Sarah Adams, 2000

Shrine house for the god Eke, Uke, 1966. Photo by Herbert M. Cole.

Herbert Cole: “The exterior walls were painted by women in an overall consistent uli style—comprised  of strong curves, swelling and tapering lines, and delicate abstract motifs. Uli patterns, whether on the body (see page one of this essay) or on clay walls, are all named, often for things of importance in the Igbo world. "Head of kola" refers to the nut shared out at all hospitality ceremonies, for example, while "cassava leaf" and "udara seed" reference valued foods while "the blood of a sacrificed chicken" has obvious ritual connotations. A large collection of uli designs would constitute a shorthand introduction to the Igbo world-view, even though the patterns are applied primarily for their striking visual effect rather than to convey overt messages.”

https://africa.uima.uiowa.edu/topic-essays/show/15?start=7

from Zaria to Nsukka

Natural Synthesis Igbo

uli body and wall painting

Uche Okeke (1993-2016)

Uche Okeke

In the 1970s, the Nsukka Group — contemporary artists associated with the University of Nigeria-Nsukka — drew inspiration from uli and nsibidi designs. Incorporating the designs into their works and experimenting with their forms and meanings, these artists created yet another context in which these graphic systems thrived. Artists in the group included El Anatsui, Olu Oguibe, and Uche Okeke.

The Art Society of Zaria: Natural Synthesis

During the period leading up to and following Nigerian independence in 1960, artists appropriated cultural and aesthetic traditions from around the country as a means of defining a new national identity. They drew upon narratives from Yoruba, Igbo, Urhobo and other cultures, Bible stories, local histories and artistic traditions to inform the content and style of their works, manipulating tales from the past to produce a mythology for the present.

This practice was defined as “natural synthesis” by the Art Society at Zaria, an arts group formed in the late 1950s by Uche Okeke, Demas Nwoko, Simon Okeke, Bruce Onobrakpeya and other art students at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (now Ahmadu Bello University) at Zaria in the northern region of Nigeria. The Art Society sought to reconsider the emphasis on Western academic artistic traditions espoused by the largely European faculty at Zaria, an art program associated with Goldsmiths (part of the University of London). Moving away from traditions steeped in colonialism, “natural synthesis” merged the best of indigenous art traditions, forms and ideas with useful ones from Western cultures to create a uniquely Nigerian aesthetic perspective.

Later known as the Zaria Rebels, the members of the Art Society devised an academic program outside of the official university curriculum. The members thoroughly researched indigenous cultural and artistic traditions, produced works based on their findings and met regularly to discuss the outcomes. Though they took a similar conceptual approach to art making, the vast diversity inherent in the practices they analyzed led to great variation in their formal and stylistic synthesis.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/global-vanguards/global-vanguards-nigeria/a/uche-okeke

March of the Masquerades, print 1982

The Uli aesthetic

Uche Okeke, the Art Society’s second president, drew inspiration for a new visual language from uli, an Igbo female body and wall painting tradition from southeastern Nigeria that is based on sinuous abstract forms derived from nature (above). In uli, Okeke saw “limitless expression,” internalizing the drawing technique he learned from his mother, a renowned uli draughtswoman, to serve a modernist sensibility.

From the Oja Suite: Punishment, Owls and Five Heads, 1962 Newark Museum

Uche Okeke, Owls, From the Oja Suite, 1962, ink on paper © The Estate of Uche Okeke (Newark Museum)

In one drawing, Owls (left), vertical lines, zigzags, spirals (agwolagwo or snake motif) and v-shapes (okala isinwaoji or three-lobed kola nut motif) come together to form two owls perched amidst dense foliage under a full moon. With his spare manipulation of line and spontaneous employment of uli symbols, Okeke distills cosmic and animal forms to their essential components. Okeke does not simply mimic uli forms but internalizes the flowing, poetic process of the drawing tradition itself, analyzing and exploiting its formal potential. In drawings like Owls, the meanings of particular uli symbols become untied from their referents and depend entirely upon the other lines, motifs and spaces within the composition for interpretation. In Okeke’s hands, the flowing lines and naturalistic patterns of uli converge to form vegetal, human and animal compositions that give form the artist’s conception of a new Nigeria.

Uche Okeke Igbo uli shrine painting

Uche Okeke

March of Masquerades 1974

Savannah Landscape, 1962, ink on paper, MOMA

Uche Okeke Onwa Ikenga, 1993

watercolor

Uche Okeke Adam and Eve, 1965

oil on board

El Anatsui (1944) Ghana/Nigeria

Anatsui was born (the youngest of his father’s 32 children) and educated in Ghana (he went to

art school in Kumasi).

El Anatsui, Gbeze, 1978. Ceramic Manganese His "Broken Pots: Sculpture by El Anatsui" was a series of vessels formed from shards of existing and created pottery. This series was Anatsui's first experiment with using many parts to create a whole, often providing new context or meaning to the pieces he was using.

Conspirators 1997 wood and mixed media

In the film, Nigerian Art: Kindred Spirits (on Blackboard for April 28) we see Anatsui in a wood workshop working on a piece like this one, with multiple pieces of wood, working with a

chain saw and blow torch. What is the reason he gives for using the chain saw and the torch?

Ewe strip woven Kente cloth

One of the inspirations for Anatsui’s work with strips of wood relates to his Ghanaian heritage

Commercial Avenue, 2014, mixed media

Untitled 2013

El Anatsui (Ghanaian, born 1944), Between Earth and Heaven, 2006 Medium: Aluminum, copper wire The Metropolitan Museum of Art

see youtube on Blackboard showing the installation of this piece (with lots of other Bamana and Dogon sculptures around)

El Anatsui, Earth’s Skin, 2007, Aluminum and Copper Wire

El Anatsui, Strips of Earth’s Skin, 2008, found aluminum and copper wire

Untitled, 2016

El Anatsui, Bukpa Old Town, 2009, Aluminum and Copper Wire Different ways of installing same piece

El Anatsui, Some Still Come Back, 2005, in Environment and Object: Recent African Art,

Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore, 2011

El Anatsui (Ghanaian, born 1944). Black Block, 2010. Aluminum and copper wire, two pieces

Brooklyn Museum

Installation View Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui Brooklyn Museum, New York, February 8–August 4, 2013

Venice Biennale 2015 Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement

Nomination by Okwui Enwezor:

“el anatsui is perhaps the most significant living african artist working on the continent today. the award for which I am recommending him is an important honor to an artist who has contributed immensely to the recognition of contemporary african artists in the global arena. it is also a worthy recognition of the originality of anatsui’s artistic vision, his long-term commitment to formal innovation, and his assertion through his work of the place of africa’s artistic and cultural traditions in international contemporary art. the golden lion award acknowledges not just his recent successes internationally, but also his artistic influence amongst two generations of artists working in west africa. it is also an acknowledgment of the sustained, crucial work he has done as an artist, mentor and teacher for the past forty-five years.”

Fading and Fresh Memories, 2007 Palazzo Fortuny, Venice

Anatsui Earth Shedding Its Skin, 2019

From the 2019 Venice Biennale (Ghana Pavilion)