africa art

Finding a Place: Nigerian Artists in the Contemporary Art World Author(s): Olu Oguibe Source: Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 30-41 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777946 Accessed: 17-10-2016 12:42 UTC

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In the late 198os a new generation of Nigerian artists began to register their

presence in the art world, especially in the metropolises of the West. They

include Sokari Douglas Camp and the late Rotimi Fani-Kayode, both of whom

had immigrated from Nigeria to the United Kingdom. In the 199os others

have come to prominence, also. These include Osi Audu, Oladeile Bamgboy6, Mary Evans, Donald Odita, Chris Ofili, Folake Shoga, Yinka Shonibare, Ike

Olu Oguibe

Finding a Place: Nigerian Artists in the Contemporary

Art World

Ude, and myself. Works by these

artists have found their way into

international biennials, group exhi- bitions, and other forums. Likewise,

scholars, critics, and other writers

in Africa, Europe, and the Americas

have begun to write about the work

of these artists with increasing fre-

quency. Conversant with the tech-

niques and discourses of new forms, and versatile in the requisite politics of the international mainstream, these

artists envision themselves and their practice alongside their contemporaries

from other parts of the world.

Although most of these artists were born and raised in Nigeria, all live

in expatriation as part of the culture of itineracy which marks the end of the

twentieth century.' Some were taken abroad at a young age by their parents.

Others left in their late teens for higher education. Still others left the country,

either as children or adults, to avoid civil strife or political persecution, espe-

cially in the late i960s, during the bitter civil war of 1967-70, which displaced

hundreds of thousands of Nigerians, and in the i98os, when military dictator- ships came to power. In all instances, however, the artists have maintained

close ties with Nigeria, most of them visiting regularly, or returning at some stage in their lives to visit or study.

Whatever the circumstances of their relocation to the West, expatriation

has accorded these artists greater opportunities to penetrate and navigate the

insular world of the international contemporary mainstream. The fact that

some of them have studied in the dominant centers of contemporary art,

especially New York and London, for example, has accorded them access to

specific conventions, spaces, curators, and critics. They also understand and

have increasingly mastered strategies of alignment and positioning without

which their presence in the West would have no significant positive effect

on their careers. In addition, they exhibit the patience and dedication required

to forge the alliances that have enhanced their professional opportunities. Last

but not least is their determination to achieve visibility-to forge a career in

the center rather than to accept the limitations of the periphery.

If location, access, familiarity with prevailing discourses and preoccupa- tions, and strategic alignments are crucial factors in the efforts of these artists

to find a place within the contemporary mainstream, the emergence of an equally new generation of forward-looking curators and critics has also made

a significant difference. In the past decade such power brokers have caused a

growing fault in what for long remained a stolid, almost impregnable wall of exclusion. With the subsidence of the museum as an all-powerful institution,

4. Ike Ude. Cond6 Nast

Traveler, 1994. From the series Cover Girl.

Cibachrome. 8X x II X

(22 x 29.2) Courtesy the artist.

I. For a detailed discussion of this condition, see Olu Oguibe, Cross/ing: Time.Space.Movement, exh. cat. (Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1998).

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there has been a shift in favor of the independent curator, whose allegiances

are more ambivalent and flexible. Such curators, working under less institu-

tional pressure, have proved more willing to experiment and to initiate cross-

cultural collaborations. In the 198os and 199os, also, segregationist positions in

the centers of contemporary cultural practice came under increasing scrutiny,

for which an entire contingent of non-Western scholars, artists, and critics

must be partly credited.2

Consequently, a more international awareness has begun to emerge

among certain curators, critics, and administrators, with the result that plat-

forms that for long remained bastions of Western exclusivity are beginning

to open up, albeit ever so cautiously, to artists from the non-Western world.

In the 199os, particularly, independent curators and critics such as Octavio

and Antonio Zaya from Spain; Rasheed Araeen, Jean Fisher, and Sean Cubitt

from England; Adelina von Furstenberg from Switzerland; Peter Weibel from Austria; Guillermo Santamarina from Mexico; and others have in different

ways expanded opportunities for non-Western artists to get a foot in the

door of the international mainstream. By offering such artists opportunities

to exhibit their work alongside their Western contemporaries or by bringing

critical attention to them and their work, this generation of curators con-

tributes to an environment in which contemporary artists from around the

world may aspire for visibility.

Perhaps even more decisive is the emergence of Nigerian and other

African practitioners within this cadre. In an era that some have described as

the Curator's Moment, the progress of a number of Nigerian artists on the

international contemporary art scene owes significantly to the increasing influ-

ence of individuals such as the Nigerian-born, New York-based curator Okwui Enwezor. In 1994 Enwezor founded Nka: Journal of Contemporary African

Art, which is now published by the Africana Studies and Research Center at

Cornell University. This journal has not only brought relative visibility to a

number of African artists and initiated serious discourse on contemporary

African art, it has also attracted many important critics, thus creating a forum

for dialogue. Enwezor was also artistic director of the Second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997-the first black African to serve as artistic director of a

major international biennial; in 1998 he was appointed the artistic director of Documenta XI. Through his curatorial work and his writing, he has show-

cased the work of artists such as Bamgboy6, Fani-Kayode, Odita, Shonibare,

and Udi, among others, placing them alongside their contemporaries from other parts of the world. He and others have questioned how the condition

of diasporicity has remapped the global terrain of contemporary culture by

questioning hegemonic concepts of ethnicity, nationality, and authenticity,

of center and periphery.

Sokari Douglas Camp made her mark on the British art scene in the 198os with her large-scale, motorized sculptures. Born in Buguma on the Niger Delta in 1958, she moved to England as a teenager, where she was raised by her brother-in-law, the anthropologist Robin Horton. In the 197os, she moved to San Francisco, where she studied briefly at the California College of Arts and

Crafts, before returning to England to enroll at the prestigious Central School

2. It was with the intention to provide a shared

platform for such scrutiny that the Tate Gallery in London, in collaboration with the Institute of

International Visual Arts (inlVA) hosted a sympo- sium on internationalism in 1994. For debates that

emerged from the symposium, see Global Visions: Toward a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed.

Jean Fisher (London: Kala Press/inlVA, 1994).

32 SUMMER 1999

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I. Sokari Douglas Camp. Church Ede, 1984. Steel, cloth, motors. 93! x I 17 x 104 (237.5 x 298.5 x 264.2). National Museum of African

Art,Washington, D.C. Museum purchase, 96-55- I. Photo Franko Khoury.

at St. Martins in London, from

which she graduated in 1984. In

between her travels abroad, Douglas Camp spent periods in Nigeria, during which she studied with the

Yoruba master sculptor Lamidi

Fakeye. In Nigeria, she also came

under the mentorship of the choreo-

grapher and dance scholar Peggy

Harper. Through Harper she made the acquaintance of the Austrian

sculptor Suzanne Wenger, matron of

the Oshogbo school, which thrived

in Nigeria in the i96os. Alali Aru, one of Douglas Camp's

earliest works, is a sculptural inter-

pretation of a pageant float or festival

boat inspired by the annual marine

festivities of the Kalagbari group of

the Niger Delta. Although her boat is

stationary and the occupants are not

represented, Douglas Camp motor- izes the oars, creating the illusion of

rowing. She also surrounds the boat

with an audience of stylized figures. These she animates with a time-

based mechanism that intermittently

enables them to clap in applause. This performative element, she informs us, was inspired by an encounter with

a Yoruba priestess named Amonia Hosfall. It was Hosfall, and her experiences with Kalagbari performance arts, that encouraged her to "make things about

movement and space."3 To accompany another early work, a funerary bed titled Church Ede (1984) (fig. i), she created an orchestra of mechanized drum-

mers that recall examples from her culture. Among the Kalagbari, a deathbed

would be decorated with buntings and flowers for the deceased's wake. The

funeral itself would also feature drummers and dancers, among the mourners. Inspired by the death of her father, Church Ede re-creates the wake scene in

steel, without the body of the deceased, its uniqueness residing not only in

its performative kinetics, but also in its power to evoke through a stringent poetry of absence.

Douglas Camp gave British sculpture a jerk by bringing an element of vitality, originality, and boldness to it. Given the British taste for the lifeless

and funereal-which has triumphed in Rachel Whiteread's casts of turned-out

ghost houses and Damian Hirst's dead animals preserved in formaldehyde- Douglas Camp's work symbolizes life, movement, elegance, inventiveness, and technical skill. Even so, her relative visibility on the British art scene has had

as much to do with the privilege of graduating from Central School and the

Royal College of Art, where she won the Henry Moore Scholarship, as with

3. Sokari Douglas Camp, in interview with Patricia

Ainslie, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 3 (Fall-Winter 1995): 38.

33 art journal

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2. Sokari Douglas Camp. Installation view of Spirits in Steel: The Art of the Kalabari Masquerade, American Museum of

Natural History, New York, April 25, 1998-january 31, 1999.? American Museum of

Natural History. Photo J. Beckett.

the formal and iconographical attributes of her work. Also, at the beginning

of her career she was keen to avoid marginalization by dissociating herself

from so-called black exhibitions and spaces. This led to a mild controversy

when, on the advice of her dealers, she declined to participate in the definitive

black British exhibition of the decade, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War

Britain, at London's Hayward Gallery in 1989.

The above notwithstanding, Douglas Camp was all but abandoned in the

early 199os by London's commercially driven art dealers and galleries, some of whom apparently found her themes difficult to market. Subsequently, her

foothold on the international scene rested increasingly on the growing interest

of ethnographic and natural history museums in her work. As her sculptures

shifted away from the initial exploration of form and its possibilities, these

museums came to see her animated dancers and masqueraders as a useful

means to illustrate a make-believe, natural context for their ethnographic col-

lections of African art. This was the basis for her exhibition Spirits in Steel: The

Art of the Kalabari Masquerade at New York's American Museum of Natural History

in 1998 (fig. 2). This symbiosis has provided a market for Douglas Camp and has ensured that she continues to enjoy visibility.

34 SUMMER 1999

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Rotimi Fani-Kayode, certainly the most celebrated Nigerian artist of his generation, had established himself as one of the most significant photo-based

artists in England by the time of his death in 1989 at age thirty-four. Having

left Nigeria with his family when he was eleven to escape a civil war, Fani-

Kayode grew up in England. He moved to the United States to study at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and at the Pratt Institute in New

York. After he finished his studies, he returned to England. His choice of art as a career earned the disfavor of his aristocratic father as much as did his

sexual orientation as a gay man. In an essay published in the journal Ten-8

in 1988, he aptly described himself as an outsider "on three counts": a failure

to his family, a gay man in an intolerant, black community, and a black artist

in a largely racist society.4

As the founding chair of the black photographers group, Autograph, Fani-

Kayode helped shape the discourses of race and sexuality in the visual arts in

England in the late I98os. During this period, black artists and curators chal- lenged conventions within the British art world that denied them access and

representation. They used their work to address difficult political and historical

issues such as colonialism, British involvement in foreign countries, and lin-

gering racial intolerance in British society. Under such racially charged cir-

cumstances, it was pertinent for black artists to partake in this challenge to the

establishment, but it was difficult for them to raise certain questions within

their own community, especially regarding sexuality. Fani-Kayode was able to

3. Rotimi Fani-Kayode. White Bouquet, 1987. Gelatin silver photograph. Courtesy the estate of Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Autograph, London.

engage both arenas, working closely with other black artists to confront

the establishment, while addressing

black discomfort with gay sexuality.

He did not reject the mainstream

even as he critiqued it. He recog- nized that the cracks that emerged within it in his time were best taken

advantage of to open it up further.

In his work, Fani-Kayode com-

bined a sophisticated understanding

of the aesthetics of religious eroti- cism with an activist devotion to the

politics of race and sexuality, which the critic Kobena Mercer has dubbed

"eros and diaspora.)"5 In Black Male,

White Male, his portfolio from the

early and mid-i 98os, Fani-Kayode moved between images of Yoruba

gods and devotees, such as Sonpono:

The Smallpox God (1987); seemingly profane, homoerotic images, such as Bronze

Head (1987); and direct engagements with race and homosexuality, such as the complex and partially autobiographical White Bouquet (1987) (fig. 3). In this

black-and-white photograph a white man presents a bouquet of flowers to a black lover. Both men are nude with their backs to the viewer. The black man

lies on a white sofa with his face turned away in a gesture of either wrathful

4. Rotimi Fani-Kayode, "Traces of Ecstasy," Ten-8, no. 28 (1988): 36. 5. Kobena Mercer, "Eros and Diaspora," in Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst, ed. Mark Sealy and

Jean Loup Pivin (Paris: Editions Revue Noire, 1997).

35 art journal

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rejection, shame, or playful coyness. While offering his present, the white

man bends his head in either penitence or a lover's romantic entreaty. Noth-

ing else is revealed, no opinion betrayed, and the viewer is left to battle with

the challenge of interpretation. As Fani-Kayode crosses the slippery terrains

of race and sexuality in White Bouquet, we find a defining element also evident

in his other works: a rhetoric of ambiguity that reminds us not only of the

highly charged nature of the discourses that he engaged and of his own loca-

tion within them, but also of his adopted guardian principle, the Yoruba deity

Esu, messenger and interpreter to the gods. In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis

Gates provides a long list of Esu's qualities, significant among which are "in-

dividuality, irony, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, dis-

ruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, encasement and rupture."6

At once the guardian of meaning and the embodiment of indeterminacy,

Esu is the divinity of the crossroads, an apropos location for a gay, black, ex-

patriate Nigerian artist living under the subtle racism of Thatcherite England.

Even Esu's sexuality, encoded in myth in the story of a maternal curse that left

him with an eternally erect penis,7 resonated with Fani-Kayode. In a number

of works he inscribed his own penis as a locus of self-definition and penance,

a trope of salvation and a curse, the ultimate crucifix. Like Esu, he proved

himself a master of the crossroads, a shrewd navigator able to create work

that takes on uncomfortable questions of race and sexuality in a manner that

implicates both his host society and the viewer-work that is nevertheless

powerful, beautiful, and engaging enough to earn the attention and respect

of his contemporaries. Although Fani-Kayode's career spanned only six years,

from 1983 to 1989, his work belongs in the canon of late twentieth-century British art.8

Ik6 Ude, who lives and works in New York, belongs to a younger generation of Nigerian artists who have emerged in the 199os. Born in Makurdi, Nigeria,

in the early i96os, he moved to New York in his late teens to study art. After

graduating from college in the late i98os, he began his career as a painter, but later changed to photo-based work and installation. His installation Cover Girl

at the nonprofit gallery Exit Art/The First World in New York in i994 estab- lished his place on the contemporary scene. In this space, he constructed a

news agent's kiosk in which he displayed mock-ups of popular magazines, from Conde Nast Traveler to Vogue, which he designed and produced himself. On

each magazine cover, he combined images and texts that address issues rang-

ing from the absence of black faces in the mass media, to stereotyping and

the misrepresentation of people of color. Each cover addresses and challenges

a theme directly relevant to the magazine's readership. On the cover of Conde

Nast Traveler (fig. 4), for instance, he presented a popular diagrammatic image

of slaves in the body of a slave ship, buried in a background of red as if in

a sea of blood. Through this image, he displaced the magazine's association with leisure travel and pleasurable adventure with a historical reference to

forced relocation and cruelty.

On his cover of Parents he presented a black nanny wheeling a white

child in a pram. However, rather than using the stereotype of an old and full- bodied Aunt Jemima for the nanny, he uses a young black woman in jeans

6. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6. 7. See Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey, An Ancient West African Kingdom, vol. 2 (Evanston: North- western University Press, 1967), 205-6. 8. Mercer, "Eros," 109.

36 SUMMER 1999

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5. Ik6 Ude. Uli, 1998. C-print. 16 x 14 (40.6 x 35.6). Courtesy the artist.

and T-shirt in a modern U.S. suburb. The image of the young maid threads a path of ambiguity, at once referencing the prevalence of cheap, Third World

domestic labor in the contemporary United States, as well as engaging the

complex issue of race and trust in U.S. society. Such themes have previously

been perceived as the preserve of certain sections

of the U.S. ethnic map. Though an outsider, Ude

nevertheless ventures into them, working squarely

in the terrain of the postmodern, where issues

of race, sexuality, glamour, popular culture, and

representation are broached in one fell swoop. Al-

though his use of magazine covers is not entirely

novel, what is unique is the relentlessness with which he has used the medium to address these

themes together rather than in isolation.

In subsequent work Udd has broadened his

techniques and media to include monoprints, photography, and body art. While his gradual

emergence in the international contemporary art

arena might be partly explained by the quality

of his work, institutional factors have also played a role. At different moments in his career, for

example, he has been a close acquaintance of or

collaborator with prominent artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, who once roomed with him and

in some of whose works he appears as a model, and Lyle Ashton Harris, with whom he has collab- orated.9 He has also worked with critics such as

bell hooks and Greg Tate and entertainers such

as RuPaul and Quentin Crisp, among many others. Udd further consolidated his place on the New York cultural scene in 1995 when he founded

the culture magazine aRude, which draws contribu-

tions from established and emerging artists, crit-

ics, and literary figures. The launch of aRude was

a glamorous affair that attracted the most visible

elements of the younger generation of New York's

cultural elite, with entertainment provided by

Greg Tate's jazz band, Women in Love. Looking further toward his Nigerian heritage,

in the late 199os Udd began to experiment with uli, the ephemeral body- and mural-painting tradi-

tion of the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria,

one of the country's three largest cultural groups. These impermanent, lyrical

designs, traditionally painted by female artists on the bodies of their clients or

family members, or on houses and compound walls, were used during mar- riages, memorial services, and other ritual occasions. In his works Udd paints

the body of a model with uli motifs and then produces a photograph of the

decorated model (fig. 5). His motifs are loosely based on classical uli but also

9. An example of their many collaborations is the well-known work Sisterhood (1994), in which Uds and Harris pose as gender-benders.

37 art journal

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include his own innovations.

Through painting, he fully

shares the experience and

process with his sitters and

leaves them with ephemera in the tradition of his sources,

while in the photographs he introduces both new media

and permanence to this

experience. While the tran-

sience of uli is uncompro-

mised, its vulnerability is nevertheless mediated.'o

Although Yinka Shonibare was born in London of

Nigerian parents in 1962, he

grew up in Nigeria before

returning to England, where

he studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and then at

Goldsmiths College of the

University of London, Eng-

land's fountain of conceptual art. Shonibare began to

exhibit his work in 1988. By 1993, when he had his first

one-person exhibition at

London's Centre 181 Gallery,

he had already participated

in several key group exhibi-

tions, including Interrogating

Identity, which traveled

through the United States

in i991. In 1992 Shonibare was one of the artists in the

Barclays Young Artist Award exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 1994 he was one of five artists in Seen/Unseen, an exhibition of leading

African artists in Britain that I curated for the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool.

He also participated in 2 out of 4 Dimensions at Centre i81. Shonibare's contribution to the Centre 181 exhibition was a work entitled

Double Dutch, composed of small "paintings." Some consisted of bright acrylic

on fabric; others consisted of just the fabric-Dutch wax, a popular printed

fabric used by millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa and increasingly

in the West among people of African descent. This fabric became a symbol of nationalist revival in the wake of political independence in Africa, a sign of

the new continent, of pride and difference. Politicians discarded their Western

business suits in favor of Dutch wax jumpers and embroidered gowns. In the

6.Yinka Shonibare. Victorian

Couple, 1999. Wax printed cotton textile. Approx. 60 x 36 x 36 (153 x 92 x 92) and 60 x 24 x 24 (153 x 61 x 61). Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

10. Other modern artists who have worked with

uli include Uche Okeke, Obiora Udechukwu, Tayo Adenaike, and myself. For more information on these artists and the tradition, see Simon

Ottenberg, New Traditions from Nigeria: Seven

Artists of the Nsukka Group, exh. cat. (Washing- ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).

38 SUMMER 1999

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7.Yinka Shonibare. Diary of a Victorian Dandy: 19:00 Hours, 1996. Photograph. 72 x 90 (183 x 228.6). Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

1970s the material made its transition into the iconography of the Black Power movement in the United States and Britain, and its residues are still to be

found in such neighborhoods as Harlem in New York and Brixton in London. In time tourists and exotica hunters bought into the myth of this "African

fabric," with its bright, decorative patterns and flowing, open-ended forms.

But just how African is this fabric, this mark of African identity and black

authenticity, this cipher of uniqueness and difference? As Shonibare observed

in an essay for Seen/Unseen, the irony of this African fabric is that it is in fact

only "a colonial construction, as its origins can be traced from Indonesia

to Holland (hence Dutch Wax), to Manchester (from where it is) then sold to Africa where indigenous variations on the fabric have been appropriated

for local use."" While for Westerners, including diaspora Africans, the ob-

vious appeal of the fabric lay in its "authenticity," Shonibare observed that

this was only a fictive authenticity, whose functional principle was seduction

(fig. 6). By appropriating this fabric, Africans were concerned with establishing

a sophisticated mark of identity that derives from the multiple, global histories

and trade routes that have given rise to Africa's modernity. The matter of

authenticity was not at all at issue, and would only arise as a figment of the

Otherizing imagination and desires of the West in search of difference.

Shonibare was fascinated by the processes of seduction, the power of

fiction, and the vulnerability of desire. Double Dutch takes its title from three

I I.Yinka Shonibare, "Purloined Seduction," in

Olu Oguibe, Seen/Unseen, exh. cat. (Liverpool: Bluecoat Gallery, 1994), 15.

39 art journal

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sources, including the British colloquialism for babble or incomprehensible

talk and the fabric's Dutch origins. In the installation, Shonibare successfully

seduced those who were attracted to the fabric because of its supposed

"African" origin. However, his formal concerns were about the meaning and

possibilities of painting at the end of the century. In the process, he drew

attention to questions of perception, the ineluctable nature of identity, and the

dangers of interpretation and mediated knowledge. He also brought ideologies

of origin and purity under crisis. If fabric produced in Indonesia, printed in

Holland, and marketed through Manchester could take on an African identity

in the minds of adept seekers of authenticity, then notions and ideologies of

authentic origin are nothing but nonsensical babble, after all.

The conceptual sophistication of Shonibare's game of seduction has made some uncomfortable. As Mercer observes, "English critics have come

away from Shonibare's work feeling that it is not quite African enough."'' This notwithstanding, he has continued to explore seduction and inauthen-

ticity as central themes in his work. In recent installations he has created

lush, make-believe Victorian parlors into which he inserts himself as a lone,

black gentleman among white aristocrats, a character navigating the corridors

of wealth and power in an era of intolerance (fig. 7). Shonibare's new tableaux are as fictional as they are historically grounded. His aristocratic

settings belong as much to Victorian England as to Victorian Lagos, which,

as records confirm, were not at all distinguishable one from the other.

Shonibare digs as deep into his Nigerian heritage among the nobility of

Lagos as he does into British history and eccentricities. In addition to these

sources, his work is very much informed by his own experiences as a child

in England in the i96os and as a youth growing up in the funk-culture of urban Nigeria in the 1970s.

Shonibare is savvy and confident as he engages the spaces of the British

mainstream, counting as much on his familiarity with it as on his sound

grounding in contemporary Nigerian culture. At Goldsmiths College he

became proficient in visual languages and discourses in the traditions of

Conceptual and postmodern art, the core of his installations and projects, which in turn has made his work viable on the international scene. As

a young artist brought up in the center, he ridicules demands for ethnic

authenticity on his part, being no less British or Nigerian by fact of his

ancestry or location. Nonetheless, he navigates that center with a strong

awareness of the disadvantages that accrue from the fact of that ancestry,

and the strength that it brings to his work.

It is tempting for those unfamiliar with the work of these artists to imag-

ine that because they operate within the space of the international mainstream, their art must be different and distanced from their heritage. Likewise, some

are inclined to imagine that insularity and protection from that mainstream

guarantee faithfulness to tradition and claim to some form of authenticity.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. As may be gleaned from this brief discussion, rather than distance themselves from their Nigerian heritage,

these artists apply their knowledge of that heritage to their work, but on their own terms and not as a condition or imperative. It is not entirely fortu-

itous that two of the artists I have mentioned, Ud& and Bamgboyi, both use

12. Kobena Mercer, "Art That Is Ethnic in Inverted

Commas," Frieze, no. 25 (1995). 13. Jennifer Higgie, "Chris Ofili," Frieze, no. 42

(September-October 1998): 86-87. 14. I have addressed the obstacles that contem-

porary artists of African origin encounter on the international scene in my earlier essay, "Art, Identity, Boundaries: The Rome Lecture," Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 3

(Fall-Winter 1995): 27-33.

40 SUMMER 1999

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orthographic signs in their names. It is a deliberate act of insistence on speci-

ficity and clear identity in the mire of a globalized world.

Even so, these artists do not perceive themselves as cultural ambassadors

any more than do their Western contemporaries. They reject the burden of

ancestry and ethnicity as a matter of fact. Having come through multiple cul-

tural circumstances, they lay claim to the entirety of their experiences and

consider themselves as much part of their societies of relocation as any others.

Among their contemporaries, they suffer the peculiar affliction of never being

discussed without some reference, no matter how benign, to their "stranger" status. Even the most sympathetic critics seem unable to avoid references to

ethnicity when discussing their work. In an otherwise sympathetic review

in Frieze in 1998, for instance, Jennifer Higgie is compelled to remind us that,

though "of Nigerian descent, Chris Ofili is English [sic], and feels no more

affinity with an African aesthetic than he does with the tradition of American

or European painting."'3 Such defensiveness, which the artists themselves are

often driven to, also, is situated in the context of the inherently treacherous

and demanding nature of the terrain in which they find themselves.'4 To con-

tend with such circumstances, these artists carry with them a pronounced

sense of self-awareness and clarity, and determination to ensure that they are at home in the world.

Olu Oguibe has taught at the University of London and as Stuart S. Golding Endowed Chair in African Art at the University of South Florida. His books include Uzo Egonu: An African Artist in the West.

4 I art journal

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