Olu Oguibe studied art at the University of Nigeria in 1981-86, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine and Applied Arts (summa cum laude) but was expelled in 1989 for political activism. There he did undertake graduate work between 1987 and 1989 before he was expelled for political activism.
Gallery of Olu Oguibe
1992
10 Thornhaugh St, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0XG, United Kingdom
Olu Oguibe obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art History from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (SOAS University of London) in 1992.
Career
Gallery of Olu Oguibe
1994
Olu Oguibe
Gallery of Olu Oguibe
1994
Olu Oguibe
Gallery of Olu Oguibe
2018
Kassel, Germany
Olu Oguibe
Gallery of Olu Oguibe
Olu Oguibe
Gallery of Olu Oguibe
Olu Oguibe
Gallery of Olu Oguibe
Olu Oguibe
Gallery of Olu Oguibe
Olu Oguibe
Gallery of Olu Oguibe
Olu Oguibe
Achievements
2018
New York City, New York, United States
Olu Oguibe speaks onstage during the International Center Of Photography's 2018 Infinity Awards in New York City.
Olu Oguibe studied art at the University of Nigeria in 1981-86, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine and Applied Arts (summa cum laude) but was expelled in 1989 for political activism. There he did undertake graduate work between 1987 and 1989 before he was expelled for political activism.
10 Thornhaugh St, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0XG, United Kingdom
Olu Oguibe obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art History from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (SOAS University of London) in 1992.
(This exhibition catalog presents ten African artists who ...)
This exhibition catalog presents ten African artists who are no longer bound by old affiliations of geography and race but whose work inevitably embodies a common claim to their home continent.
Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art
(Against the musty stereotypes and prejudices that still c...)
Against the musty stereotypes and prejudices that still consider Africa a dark continent full of nameless, Third World nations always striving but never managing to catch up with the West, Authentic/Ex-Centric positions Africa as the source of many of the ideas associated with European modernism. From Cubism's radical abstraction to 70s performance art and its use of ritual, shamanism, and magic, the influence of African art has long been underappreciated.
(In the celebrated, controversial essays gathered here, Og...)
In the celebrated, controversial essays gathered here, Oguibe exposes the disparities of the reception and treatment afforded Western and non-Western artists, the obstacles that these contradictions create for non-Western and minority artists, and nature and peculiar concerns of contemporary non-Western art as it deals with the ramifications and residues of the colonial encounter as well as its own historical and cultural past.
(Over a seven-year period between the late 1980s and the m...)
Over a seven-year period between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, Olu Oguibe wrote some of the most powerful and apocalyptic poetry ever to come out of Africa. In that period he published three slim volumes of poems that established his reputation as perhaps the finest poet of his generation: A Song from Exile, A Gathering Fear, and the long love poem, Songs for Catalina.
Olu Oguibe is a Nigeria-born artist, cultural scientist, former educator, art historian, and internationally active curator. For almost four decades Olu Oguibe has been working as a conceptual artist and thinker with an interest in wide-ranging themes, including social and formal issues. Among his writings are A Gathering Fear, Uzo Egonu, Cross/ing: Time, Space, Movement, Authentic - Ex-centric, and God's Transistor Radio.
Background
Olu Oguibe was born on the 14th of October, 1964 in Aba, a commercial city in Eastern Nigeria, but because of the Biafra war, his family returned to the town where my parents were born. He is the son of George Anyamele, a clergyman, and Margaret Chinyere (Ufomba), a hairstylist. He has seven younger sisters. On the family tree, everyone right up to his father was a deity priest. However, his grandfather did the sacrifices necessary to free his son of any obligation to the priesthood. Ironically his father still ended up as a Christian evangelist.
Education
Olu Oguibe got his first artistic experience from his father. In high school, he did fine arts. Eventually, he studied art at the University of Nigeria in 1981-86, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine and Applied Arts (summa cum laude) but was expelled in 1989 for political activism. There he did undertake graduate work between 1987 and 1989 before he was expelled for political activism. He moved to London for six years, where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art History from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (SOAS University of London) in 1992.
Olu Oguibe did national service during which he taught art in the Ogun State College of Education in Abeokuta. In 1994, he began to work as a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he taught Critical Theory in the Visual Arts for one year. Additionally, he was a guest lecturer at numerous other institutions including the Universities of Augsburg, Bayreuth, Oxford, Manchester, and Edinburgh, as well as Howard University and the Sydney Institute of Technology. After that, he moved to the United States, where he became an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago until 1996. Then, he joined the University of South Florida in Tampa, where he was a Stuart Golding Professor and held the Stuart Golding Endowed Chair in African Art between 1996 and 1999. Moreover, he was a senior fellow of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School in Manhattan in 2001-02.
In 2003, Olu enrolled the University of Connecticut, where he served as a professor of Art and African American Studies until 2017. Also, there he was an interim director at the Institute for the African American Studies University of Connecticut in 2010-11. At Connecticut, he taught art history, painting, drawing.
Olu Oguibe has practiced as an artist for several years and have had one-person exhibitions in Nigeria, Britain, Germany, and Australia from 1988. He worked as a painter for several years but concentrate on installation art presently. He also has worked as an international curator and consultant on contemporary art at places including the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London. Besides, in 2004 he was the Critic-in-Residence for Art Omi. Oguibe has also served on the boards of Third Text, Social Identities, Atlantica, and the literary journal, Wasafiri. Presently, he works on a project on sex work for sonsbeek 2020 in Arnhem, Netherlands.
In 1994, Oguibe co-founded Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art in New York, and he has also been the co-editor of aRude, the publisher of the online art journal Laundry, and has curated many exhibitions for major institutions around the world. Nka was co-published with the Africana Studies Center of Cornell University and with the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation. His first book of poetry, the lyrical long poem A Song from Exile (1990), explores the pain of exile. A sense of loss and collective pain dominates these poems, a later collection, Songs for Catalina (1994), contains ten love poems. He also edited Sojourners: New Writing by Africans in Britain (1994), and has recently published Authentic/ Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art (2001, 2002), in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name and with Salah Hassan, The Culture Game (2004), a collection of essays that explore the obstacles and contradictions that non-Western artists must face, and I Am Bound to This Land by Blood (2005), which is an online article. His most recent book, I Am Bound to this Land by Blood: Collected Poems, came out in 2013.
Olu Oguibe is a prominent artist, well-known art historian and critic, exhibitions curator, as well as a prominent poet, musician, and author - in short, a Renaissance man. He is part of the recent generation of African-born artists who emerged on the international scene in the early '90s. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, and he has participated in several international biennials and triennials, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, District of Columbia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He has also created permanent public works in many countries and curated or co-curated several significant international exhibitions.
In 1998, Olu Oguibe got Resident Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy. Also, he received Senior Fellowship by Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School in 2001 and 2002. Four years later, he earned Senior Fellowship by Smithsonian Institution, Washington.
In 1992, Oguibe received Kigbo All-Africa Prize for Literature for A Gathering Fear and was highly acclaimed in Africa. He received Governor's Award for Excellence and Lifetime Achievement by the State of Connecticut in 2013. At the same year, he got Fulbright Award to Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India but it was declined.
Olu Oguibe's work was among the most prominently displayed in the city of Kassel, Germany, during Documenta 14. And in recognition of his work in Kassel and Documenta 14's second venue, Athens, Oguibe has received this edition’s Arnold Bode Prize, presented by the city of Kassel in 2017.
(Game by Olu Oguibe was made in Albisola in 2003 during th...)
2003
Politics
Oguibe lived under several dictatorships, and quite a number of my friends spent time in jail. It is something that has always been a concern to him. Over the years, he has been involved in several campaigns on behalf of prisoners of conscience.
Views
For almost four decades Olu Oguibe has been working as a conceptual artist and thinker with an interest in wide-ranging themes, including social and formal issues. Although the Igbo system of thought and existential principles play a critical role in Oguibe's creative endeavors dictating his approach to conceptualism, abstraction, and the form of the art object the vital force behind his art is his experiences as a child in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s. His poetry and artworks produced from diverse media often reflect political and social issues as well as changes in his own life. In Nigeria, he painted on traditional mats, baskets, and cane meshes. In England, he painted in watercolor and later acrylics. As he moves into the post-modern world of art, Oguibe's interests have recently shifted to installation art, through which he evokes the suffering of children and his own childhood experiences during the Biafran War. In turn, he has gradually ceased to draw upon uli and nsibidi designs, but he does explore the arts of other Third World countries, such as ancient Mexico, Aboriginal Australia, and the Near East, as well as the traditional flag designs of the Fante of coastal Ghana. He has now completely moved beyond the Nsukka tradition.
Quotations:
"If I'm interested in something, I do it. I suppose you'd say I'm promiscuous in terms of experiences. If it has something to do with the intellect, I'm drawn to it."
Interests
chess, mathematics, reading, music
Writers
Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Alex La Guma, Federico Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, Christopher Okigbo and Mahmoud Darwish. I also enjoy June Jordan, Carl Sandburg, Salvador Espriu, and Octavio Paz
Music & Bands
Eclectic: Sir Warrior to Yothu Yindi.
High Life: Joe Nez, Sir Warrior, Victor Olaiya, Victor Uwaifo.
The Blues: Robert Cray, John Lee Hooker, BB King, Etta James, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison.
Rock: Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Knopfler, Guns and Roses, Tracy Chapman, Pre-Batman Seal.
Pop: Michael Jackson, Sade.
Funk: James Brown, Fella Anikulapo-Kuti.
Hip-Hop: Tupac, NWA, Public Enemy, Naughty by Nature, Salt N' Pepper.
Reggae: Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, Aswad, Black Uhuru, Sly and Robbie.
R&B: Anita Baker, Stevie Wonder, Natalie Cole.
Jazz: All the old school: Duke, Sachmo, Count, Ella, Lady, then, Miles - Sketches of Spain, Miles Ahead, Kind of Blue, Highlights from the Plugged Nicke, Coltrane, Bird, Dollar Brand, Dollar Brand, and the God of the Trumpet, Hugh Masekela.
George Benson, Don Cherry, Groover Washington, Steve Williamson and Bheki Mseleku, The Empress, Miriam Makeba, Tchaikovsky, Nigel Kennedy.
Connections
There is no information about Olu Oguibe's private life.
Father:
George Anyamele Oguibe
George Anyamele is a Nigerian clergyman, preacher, a former school teacher, and a sign painter. While he worked in the ministry after the war he also made wooden statuettes, religious icons for Catholics, as well as carved masks for masking societies, although he belonged to a religious sect that shunned both practices.
Mother:
Margaret Chinyere (Ufomba) Oguibe
colleague:
Okwui Enwezor
Okwui Enwezor, in full Okwuchukwu Emmanuel Enwezor, was born on the 23rd of October, 1963 in Calabar, Nigeria and died on the 15th of March, 2019 in Munich, Germany. He was a Nigerian-born poet, art critic, art historian, and curator who helped bring global attention to African art. He began writing widely for art magazines and even launched one of his own, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, founded in 1994 and published in concert with the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
As a curator, Enwezor became known for his work on an exhibit of African photography at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York City, in 1996; at the "Africas" Second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, and as an adjunct curator (1998–2000) of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Later exhibits curated included a group show that traveled through Europe and Canada and a showing of the work of South African photographer David Goldblatt in 2000. A frequent lecturer and member of many art juries, Enwezor also coedited, along with Olu Oguibe, Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (1999). In 2002 Enwezor mounted his first major show, "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994," at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York. He put into practice his theory of art as an expression of social change when from 1998 to 2002 he was the artistic director of "Documenta 11," the 11th in a series of international exhibitions held in Kassel, Germany, for three months every five years. In 2006 Enwezor organized "Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography" at the International Center of Photography, New York City. Intended to address a trend he termed "Afro-pessimism," the exhibit contradicted negative contemporary Western attitudes and stereotypical ideas of Africa. In 2011 Enwezor became the director of Haus der Kunst, a non-collecting contemporary art museum in Munich. During his tenure, he was commended for offering a more-global exhibition program, which included "Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–65" (2017). The extensive survey, which included a range of media, considered the fallout of World War II on such frequently overlooked countries as Iran, China, Mozambique, and Mexico. As the director of Haus der Kunst, however, Enwezor also contended with years of budget shortfalls and a scandal wherein a human resources manager was accused of attempting to recruit staff members to the Church of Scientology, which is highly monitored in Germany. Meanwhile, in 2015 Enwezor became the first African curator of the Venice Biennale.
