Chika Okeke-Agulu, eminent professor of African Art at Princeton University, United States of America (U.S.A.), will on Thursday, June 18, present his new book, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonisation in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. The event holds at Goethe-Institut Lagos from 3pm to 6pm.
Published by Duke University Press, the book features an introduction by Frank Ugiomoh of the University of Port Harcourt. It has 129 colour images.
Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art, the book chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967.
Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual and critical networks in several Nigerian cities: Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated post-colonial modernism in Nigeria. The author explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonisation and nationalism in the early- and mid-20th century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonisation into a distinctive “post-colonial modernism” that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.
He had, on October 23, 2012, presented at the same venue the festschrift in honour of Demas Nwoko titled, Ezumeezu: Essays on Nigerian Art & Architecture he co-edited by Obiora Udechukwu. It is an unprecedented compilation of essays by important art critics, historians, artists, writers and scholars on the work of Nwoko, the influential Nigerian artist, architect, designer and politician, and on Nigerian art, architecture and art administration.
