MAKING AFRICA
Yes, tomorrow I will give a gallery talk in the MAKING AFRICA exhibition at the Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin.
I will title the talk, “I am Africa.”
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Yes, tomorrow I will give a gallery talk in the MAKING AFRICA exhibition at the Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin.
I will title the talk, “I am Africa.”
I went to the Odo Ogbe market, Ile Ife.
The market women went, “Oyinbo, come give us a hug.”
This world is beautiful.
Gina sat on the floor by the doorstep waiting for us when we returned late to Benin City from Iludun. I didn’t she was sitting there until the headlamps lit up the spot where she was and Felicia said, “Hey, is that not Gina?”
It had been a long day spent mostly on the road and it took me a minute to adjust my mind to what was happening. I was exhausted from hours of driving on rough roads to and fro Iludun, Mama Rufus’s place.
My art class before the Coronavirus.
I dreamed about it last night–I was teaching, and there was this really brilliant student who did everything perfectly.
As I went to take a closer look at her work, I woke up.
What really happened was that I had fallen asleep with my music playing. And what really woke me up was Peter Tosh, singing,
Eight of my paintings will be shown at an art exhibition opening tomorrow Saturday, November 9, in Nairobi, Kenya.
These paintings I am showing in the exhibition are open—meaning that the paintings have no figures that can be identified as a person, place, object, tree, water or anything else that one could recognize and name. The paintings do not attempt to tell any story, nor do they illustrate any scene. The paintings are open to absorb whatever story the viewers may bring them, and they also assist in opening up the viewers’ minds to excavate memories and ideas that are in the subconscious of the viewers.
Madam Ngu looked at my most recent painting and from the expression on her face, I could see that she did not like it.
She sat on the big chair in the center of my studio in the Ekenwan campus. I had arranged my paintings around the wall as she requested, ready for her critique.
“Muyo,” she said, “you need more life drawing classes.”
“Yes, madam,” I responded.
This morning, in my African Diaspora Visions class (an art history class that I teach at the University of Texas, Austin), a student from Trinidad and Tobago said, “In a hundred years, everybody in the world will be a Nigerian, or have family ties to Nigerians.”