Too many people don taya for dis obodo Naija, I swear.
Our suffer don do!
Kole Omotoso wrote JUST BEFORE DAWN in 1988.
Just before dawn, people say, it gets really dark.
It is now nearly forty years after Omotoso thought the dawn would break on Nigeria, but no, it gets darker every second in Naija .
Moyo Okediji
Title: What the MoMA Did To My Momma Series #1
Medium: Collage
Date: April 2018
How to train an apprentice artist?
Get her to work with you on your own art.
Get her to go through the process that you go through.
Get her to understand that it is a lot of work.
But there is no amount of talking that can convey that fact to her.
Moyo Okediji
Title: Excavations of the First Dynasty
Medium: acrylic on canvas
date: 2021
At my studio in Austin, Adetola Wewe is seen working with Keji Badmus, the first recipient of the Apprenticeship Program of the University of African Art at Austin.
The apprenticeship system is the indigenous art education school practice in the indigenous African creative cultures.
Artist: Moyo Okediji, Painting in the Round Series: Visitors from Another Space/Time.
acrylic on canvas
Dimension: unequal.
Date: 2007
The Last Dance.
Adetola Wewe is working in my studio gallery on his last painting as the first resident fellow of the University of African Art at Austin.
He is concluding a one-month stay, and has produced an incredible number of paintings during this short period.
He will leave for Houston during the week, from where he plans to fly back home.
Today, he will share his residency experience with the students of the University of Texas at Austin, in a course titled “Introduction to African Art,” taught by Moyo Okediji.
Moyo Okediji
Title: The Butterfly Thinks Himself A Bird
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Date 2021
Size: 24″ x 30″
The title is an important line in playwright Ola Rotimi’s masterpiece, THE GODS ARE NOT TO BLAME.
Rotimi took the line from a Yoruba proverb, “Labalábá fira rẹ̀ wẹ́ye, kò le ṣìṣe ẹyẹ.” ̛It means, “The butterfly compares itself to the bird, but is unable to perform like a bird.”
Moyo Okediji
Title: We Are All Fishes Angling in a Simmering Lake
Medium: acrylic on canvas
Date: 2021
24″ x 30″
Artist: Moyo Okediji
Title: The Not-I Bird (After Wole Soyinka’s Poem in DEATH AND THE KING’S HORSEMAN)
Wole Soyinka: The Not-I Bird
“Not-I became the answering-name
Of the restless bird, that little one
Whom Death found nesting in the leaves
When whisper of his coming ran
Before him on the wind. Not-I
Has long abandoned home.
Hanging out with Adetola Wewe on the riverboat on Lake Travis, Austin, Texas.
He is visiting from Nigeria as the first fellow-in-residence, University of African Art at Austin.
TO MY GRANDDAUGHTER ON GRANDPAS DAY
I landed a fish last summer.
It begged me to catch and release.
I said I was hungry
It said better to hunger than kill
“We are all fishes”, it reminded me,
“angling in a lake of love.”
I saw the same fish this summer