The Pattern of Modernity: Textiles in Art, Fashion, and Cultural Memory

in Nigeria since 1960

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy to the Department of History and Cultural Studies of Freie
Universität Berlin

By:
Erin Michelle Rice

Berlin, 2020
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Wendy M.K. Shaw
Second examiner: Prof. Dr. Tobias Wendl

Date of defense: 16 July 2018

Grade: Magna Cum Laude

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ABSTRACT
The Pattern of Modernity: Textiles in Art, Fashion and Cultural Memory in
Nigeria since 1960

This thesis explores the appropriation of printed and tie-dyed textiles in visual art and
culture produced in Nigeria since 1960. By examining the social and political
functions of the Yoruba indigo dyed fabric called adire as they evolved over the 20th
century, the analyses of artistic appropriations are informed by the perspectives and
histories of the cultural production of women in Nigeria's southwest dyeing centers.
Questions related to gendered production of both "traditional crafts" and "modern art"
are raised and reformulated for the specific context of textiles. Additionally, the
ideology of 'Natural Synthesis' that was a formative force for the post-Independence
generation of artists is considered as an influence on the drive to appropriate textiles
and their patterns, as well as to conceive of them as "traditional" culture within an
artistic paradigm of tradition and modernity. It argues that appropriations of textiles
by modernist artists seize and sometimes erase the modernity of female and
indigenous cultural production. Since these late modernist movements, artistic
appropriations of textiles have continued within the field of visual arts, but underwent
significant evolution in terms of media, subject matter, and conceptual
underpinnings. Artists no longer undermine the modernity of cultural producers, but
use it as a critical tool. These changes represent both a departure from modernist
styles that characterized artistic practices in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a
renegotiation with the relationship of textiles to the historical and cultural past of a
young nation. As artists and designers of the late 20th and 21st centuries explore the
textile in new media and on different terms from their predecessors, new themes
emerge such as consumerism, memory and history that situate this generation of
cultural producers within global artistic genres and spheres that have dominated
since the 1980s.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
i. Title Page
ii. List of Advisors
iii. Abstract
iv. Table of Contents
v. List of Illustrations
vi. Glossary
vii. Acknowledgements
viii. Dedication
I. Introduction..................................................................................................13
 Intersections and Interstices
 Reading Art and Writing Art History through Textiles: A methodological
approach
 Methods and Field Research
 Literature Review
 On ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’
 On the Documentation of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nigeria
 Textile as Medium and Subject
 Chapter Summaries
II. Chapter One | The Trouble with Textiles: Challenges in exhibiting,
appropriating, and theorizing an everyday material.................................49
 Fracturing the Narrative
 Exhibiting the Traditional: A survey and critique of textiles in curatorial
practice
 Exhibiting the Contemporary, Seeking Authenticity: Textiles and art in
curatorial practice
 Appropriation as Artistic Procedure

III. Chapter Two | Adire Eleko in Modern Art: Appropriation and synthesis
as artistic strategies from Zaria and beyond.............................................87
 The Artist as Ethnographer
 Appropriation as a Subversive Artistic Strategy
 Natural Synthesis as Nationalism
 Uli and the Question of Ownership
 Uli, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Art
 Adire Eleko: The modernization of indigo dyeing
 Adire in Modern Art
 Politics into Patterns
 Appropriating the Design and Symbolism of the Adire Oloba
 On the Significance of a Signature

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  Adire Appropriation beyond Zaria
 Preservation and Indigenization from Schools to Workshops

IV. Chapter Three | Transcending "Tradition": Making and invoking memory

through dress, design, and art in contemporary Nigeria........................146
 Aso-ebi and the Economy of Dress and Memory
 The Rise of Factory Print
 Modernity and Synthesis in Nigerian Fashion since 1960
 Textiles, Photography and the Desire to Remember and be Remembered
 But Them Can’t Be God: Chinese textiles in Nigerian Dress and
Contemporary Art
 A Rebirth of the Indigenous Textile
 Common Threads: Interdisciplinary overlap between contemporary art and
fashion
 Beyond “Tradition”: Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s reinvention of adire
66

V. Conclusion...................................................................................................186
 The Past, Present and Future for Textiles in Contemporary Art in Nigeria

VI. Images..........................................................................................................189
 Introduction
 Chapter One
 Chapter Two
 Chapter Three

VII. Bibliography................................................................................................225
VIII. Appendix......................................................................................................233
 Table of artists working with textiles
 Publications List
 Results Summary / Kurzfassung der Ergebnisse
 Curriculum Vitae

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 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter 1
1.1 A selection of texts illustrating preference for strip-woven cloth for cover image.
1.2 Installation view of Abdoulaye Konaté “Gris-Gris Blancs,” at Blain Southern in
Berlin February 2015
1.3 Aso-oke handwoven cloth in cotton and Lurex, Plankensteiner (2010), 78.
1.4 Obinna Makata, “Pregnant in the Belly,” 2012, ink and fabric on paper, 26.5 x
35.5 cm.
1.5 Kolade Oshinowo “Engagement,” 2011, mixed media painting, 80x154 cm.

Chapter 2
2.1 Bruce Onobrakpeya “Uli” 1970, Bronzed lino relief. Darah and Quel (1992), 148.
2.2 Adire cloth in Olokun pattern, Yoruba woman’s wrapper, indigo dye on cotton,
©Trustees of the British Museum
2.3 Bruce Onobrakpeya, “Obioko II (The Boatman),” 1983, plastograph, 32.7 x 23.5
cm. jegede (2014), 101.
2.4 Bruce Onobrakpeya, “Zaria Indigo,” 1965, oil painting on board, 102 cm x 76 cm.
From jegede, (2014), 124.
2.5 Adire Oloba, indigo dye on cotton. ©Trustees of the British Museum
2.6 Yoruba language newspaper from May 11, 1935
2.7 Adire oloba, Diko compound, Abeokuta. Collection of the Smithsonian Institute
2.8 King Edward VIII Adire Oloba, Goode and King (2008) 31.

2.9 Bruce Onobrakpeya, “Nativity II,” 1978, lino engraving. Image courtesy of Bruce
Onobrakpeya Foundation
2.10 Bruce Onobrakpeya, “Have you Heard?,” ca. 1970, serigraph on paper, 55.9 x
76.2 cm. From: http://www.gafraart.com/artists/25-bruce-onobrakpeya/works/25/
(accessed 1.7.17)
2.11 Tijiani Mayakiri and Duro Ladipo on stage during Ladipo’s Oba Moro at the
Mbari Mbayo Club, Oshogbo in 1962. From Beier (1991), 41.

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Chapter 3
3.1 “A mother and her son, October 1st, 1960”
http://nigerianostalgia.tumblr.com/post/42228675219/a-mother-and-her-son-oct-1st-
1960-more-vintage (accessed 1.7.2017)
3.2 Adire Kaftan by Folashade Thomas Fahm. From: Thomas-Fahm, Faces of She
(2004) 79.
3.3 Kelani Abass “Asiko 2 (Family album series),” 2013, diptych, corrugated
cardboard, laminated print and acrylics on canvas, 91x122x6 cm, each.

3.4 Ayo Akinwande “赢得 – Win,” 2017, (From top left) “Filà,” Resin cast coral beads,
plastic helmet, 45x25x18 cm; “Àwòtélè,” Texts on used and machines-sewn cement
sacks, 91x132 cm.; “Àwòsókè,” used and machine-sewn cement sacks, aluminum, N5
naira notes, 118 x 147 cm.
3.5 Vlisco brochure “See: A Vision of Beauty” from last season of 2015.
3.6 An apprentice applies wax resist with a stamp at the studio of Akeem Shofolahan,
Masallam Kampala Adire Factory, Abeokuta, Nigeria, March 2014.
3.7 Detail of cloth with cowrie shell motif.
3.8 Adire cloths drying on outdoor racks and on the roadside at an adire factory in
Ijemo, Abeokuta, March 2014.
3.9 Removing the thread from a sewn-patterned adire at the Ijemo factory, Abeokuta
March 2014.
3.10 Scraping the resist substance off a newly dyed stenciled adire. Ijemo, Abeokuta,
March 2014.
3.11 Iyaalaro Olayemi Showunmi with an un-dyed adire alabere she was working on.
Ijemo, Abeokuta, March 2014.
3.12 From the Maki-Oh Autumn/Winter 2014 collection, source: http://makioh.com/#
3.13 Woman in commemorative adire-style iro, buba, gele, Lagos 2014

3.14 Maki-Oh “Nigeria at 50,” 2010, Mixed-media installation. From: www.makioh.com

3.15 Temitayo Ogunbiyi “Eagles Will Fly as We Glide in the Sky and Hope to Walk
on Water” 2012, mixed media installation.
3.16 Temitayo Ogunbiyi “Eagles Will Fly as We Glide in the Sky and Hope to Walk
on Water” (detail) 2012.
3.17 Temitayo Ogunbiyi, "Elevator Chatter (Abeokuta to Dakar)" 2014, Interior view
3.18 Temitayo Ogunbiyi, "Elevator Chatter (Abeokuta to Dakar)" 2014, Exterior view.
3.19 Temitayo Ogunbiyi, “Towards Remembering 160-Something” 2012, printed
cotton textile part of multimedia installation

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3.20 Temitayo Ogunbiyi, detail of multimedia installation “Towards Remembering
160-Something” 2012, Nigeria House, Theatre Royal, London

8
 GLOSSARY
Adire: (Yoruba) An indigo-dyed cotton cloth produced in southwestern Nigeria
predominantly by Yoruba women using a variety of resist-dyeing techniques
including tying, stitching or painting patterns with a resist paste.
Agbada: (Yoruba) A men's ensemble composed of four pieces, including a flowing
wide sleeved robe. In Nigeria, the agbada is typically worn on special occasions and
is often composed of aso-oke fabric. Variations on the outfit exist throughout West
Africa.
Ankara: A common term used within Nigeria to refer to all factory-produced printed
fabrics. Often used interchangeably with "African Print."
Aso-ebi: (Yoruba) Meaning 'cloth of the family," aso-ebi denotes the practice of
dressing in uniform for events and special occasions for the purposes of identifying
and uniting members of a family, group, or community through dress. The chosen
fabric may also serve to commemorate the event.
Aso-oke: (Yoruba) a cloth woven predominantly by men on a hand loom by the
Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria. Meaning "top cloth," aso-oke is considered a
prestige cloth and is typically reserved for special and ceremonial occasions.
Batik: (Javanese) A cloth produced through wax-resist dyeing. Its production exists
in several parts of the world, however Javanese batik is perhaps best known, and is
the prototype upon which Dutch wax prints and African prints were based.
Buba: (Yoruba) tailored blouse
Dutch Wax-Print / African Print / Hollandaise: Often used interchangeably, these
terms refer to the cotton fabrics produced by the Dutch starting in the 19th century as
imitations of Javanese batiks and sold in West African textile markets. The cloth has
become so embedded in the dress of West African people and expatriate
communities that it is often referred to as "African Print" or "African" fabrics. "African
Print" may also refer to the production of wax-prints by African manufacturers.
Edo: May refer to the people or language primarily found in Nigeria's Edo State
formerly of the Benin Empire.
Fancy Print: An imitation of the more costly Dutch Wax Print and other expensive
fabrics produced by rollers. The difference, aside from price and production, is that
the fancy print is one-sided while a true wax print is double sided.
Gele: (Yoruba) Head-tie or headscarf for women.
Guinea Cloth: an umbrella term for numerous types of cotton textiles usually
manufactured in India (though some were also produced in Europe as imitations of
Indian cottons) and brought to the west coast of Africa by Europeans who
exchanged them with West Africans for slaves, gold, ivory and pepper.
Igbo: May refer to the people, culture or language of the former Kingdom of Nri and
located in Nigeria's south-central and eastern regions.
Iro: (Yoruba) Women’s wrapper

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Kaftan: A pullover robe worn by both men and women in a number of variations and
locations throughout the world. Revived in late 20th century Nigerian fashion through
contemporary tailoring and lightweight fabrics.
Raffia: Refers to the natural threads harvested from raffia palms native to tropical
regions of West Africa and used in tie-dyeing adire cloth.
Yoruba: Refers to the people, language, religion or culture of the southwest regions
of Nigeria and parts of Benin. Formerly part of the Kingdoms of Oyo and Ife-Ife,
Yoruba people make up one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa.
Uli: (Igbo) Also known as uri, refers to a pictorial system of design of the Igbo people.
Specifically, Igbo women utilized the linear forms to decorate bodies and their
homes.

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like any project of the same scope and duration of a dissertation, it takes many
people to bring it to fruition.
I would like to first thank Wendy, my Doktormutter, for believing in this dissertation
from the very beginning, when it looked nothing like it does now, for her incisive
critiques of my writing, and for being both an advisor and friend.
I am indebted to the many artists who opened their homes and studios to share their
work and ideas with me. Their insights into the art world of Lagos and their own
practices were a powerful force that shaped this study. They include: Temitayo
Ogunbiyi, Obinna Makata, Kelani Abass, George Edozie, Ayo Akinwande, Ndidi
Dike, Ibrahim Lawal, Olu Amoda, Andrew Esiebo, Toyin Omolowo and Ngozi
Schommers. Through Engineer Yemisi Shyllon and a fellowship at OYASAF I was
very fortunate to meet some of Nigeria's great elders of the art world including Bruce
Onobrakpeya and Yusuf Grillo, Nike Okundaye, Kolade Oshinowo and Bisi Fabunmi.
OYASAF also introduced me to several younger and emerging artists, among them
Peju Alatise, whose fabric-based work is testament to the evolving possibilities of the
medium. I am so grateful to Titi and Mike Omoighe for accompanying me (a stranger
at the time) on two trips to Abeokuta, and to Jean Borgatti for introducing us. Those
two trips to the Adire Factory in Ijemo provided some of the most important data for
the thesis. With their help, I not only witnessed adire being made, but was able to
speak with the women sustaining the practice in the 21st century against many odds.
I am especially thankful to the staff at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos for
hosting me as I did research in and around Lagos, and to the founder and director
Bisi Silva for the chance to present my research at CCA, and for entrusting me with
the coordination of her incredible Asiko program.
Thanks to the Swiss National Science Foundation, Theodor Schenk Stiftung, Bern
University Research Foundation, and the Dr. Josephine de Kármán Stiftung for the
financial support, and to the Walter Benjamin Kolleg (IASH) for a space to work.
I am thankful to my colleagues from the 'Other Modernities' project for their feedback
and for making our research trips and meetings an entertaining respite from the
lonely work of writing, as well as to Miriam for your encouragement, to Marita for the
laughs and friendship that pulled me through, to Abhi for keeping my American
colloquialisms in check, and to my parents for their support. Thanks to Prof. Peter
Probst for suggesting I go to Nigeria in the first place, and to Prof. Tobias Wendl for
taking on the role of second advisor when this project migrated to Berlin.
Last, but certainly not least, to Patrick, who encouraged me to do this project from
the start and stuck by my side the whole long way through it.

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For Patrick, forever-ever.

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 INTRODUCTION

Intersections and Interstices:

The opening scenes of Lágbájá’s music video for the song "Never Far Away" (2005)
alternate between a residential courtyard of a Nigerian town set beneath a roofscape
of corrugated tin and flashbacks to a domestic scene.1 In this latter setting, the artist
argues with his presumed ex-love who provides the lead vocals to the song about
loss, longing and hope. The drumbeats that open the song eventually give way to
guitars and a string orchestra. Dressed in black suits, ties, and dresses the
musicians enter the courtyard with their instruments only to be ridiculed by onlookers
for their formal, Western attire. Laughing and wagging a finger in disapproval,
Lágbájá shakes his head and beckons the musicians to come to him as he empties a
bag of indigo blue, tie-dyed fabrics onto the ground. Within an instant, the violinists
and cellists are wearing matching indigo tunics, wrappers and head-ties. Lágbájá,
now satisfied with the uniform change, assumes the role of conductor dressed in one
of his signature masked headpieces and matching top.2 Once seated, the string
orchestra joins an ensemble of Yoruban drummers to play for a captivated audience.
Seen only in flashbacks for the most of the song, the female vocalist triumphantly
arrives in the courtyard near the end of the video, weaving her way slowly through
the crowd to take her place amongst the musicians. Momentarily awed by her
presence, Lágbájá moves towards her with arms held wide and embraces her
against the backdrop of indigo blue.

The indigo-dyed fabric called adire, meaning 'tie and dye' in Yoruba, used by the
orchestra in the music video symbolizes the political, social and economic history in
which it has been both witness and actor. An icon of Yoruba cultural and sartorial
heritage, adire is utilized in "Never Far Away" to symbolize the embrace of local
culture and the rejection of foreign culture through the act of undressing from their
Western style clothing. Worn as a uniform by the musicians, adire communicates
belonging and acceptance amongst the crowd and within the local culture, signified

1
The music video can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n7hA-NDMWA
2
The outfits always include a mask or headpiece that cover his face and reveal only his
eyes. Concealing his identity through dress is meant to convey the artist’s embodiment of
the common man through anonymity. http://www.lagbaja.com/about/about.php Accessed
July 1, 2016.
13
as much by the familiar blue patterns of the cloths as by the blend of indigenous and
contemporary styles in which they are tailored and worn. Yet, at the same time that
the cloth brings a local, visual vernacular, the textile also aestheticizes the synthesis
at play in Lágbájá’s music--for it too is a synthesis of diverse sources. While "Never
Far Away" is a fusion of African drums with European strings, jazz with afrobeat, and
English with Yoruba lyrics to the melody of 21st century popular music, adire's
patterns present an amalgamation of foreign and regional imagery and design, and
its material and technique of production may include cotton of European, Nigerian or
Asian origin, ancient West and North African dyeing customs, and organic or
synthetic indigo and additives from multiple, often distant, sources. Its use in this
music video sets the stage for an in-depth study of the contemporary uses of Yoruba
heritage that go beyond the boundaries of artistic and academic disciplines. This is,
after all, not a dissertation strictly about art, photography, popular culture, textiles or
dress but rather about the moments when these cultural ephemera intersect, overlap
and interact, and what it means when they do.

These moments begin to unfold in the early 20th century when the adire industry
reached its economic and creative peak. This was swiftly followed by a steep decline
as adire became integrated in the political landscape of the 1940s, though it
underwent a minor revival in the second half of the 20th century with the help of
artists, fashion designers, and individuals with interests in cultural heritage and pro-
nationalist sentiments. Within this context, this study analyzes the appropriations of
the material or patterns of painted and printed textiles that include adire and factory
printed cloth by artists and designers working in Nigeria. It examines the ways
cultural actors tended to conflate indigenous textiles--in this case those made by
women--with “traditionality.” Used as a foil to the modernity of mid-century arts and
cultural production, the textile provides a nostalgic link to the pre-colonial past in a
search for a national identity for artists associated with the late modernist period of
the 1960s. Later, the widespread practice of tailoring clothing and the decreasing
cost of factory printed textiles inspired a number of artist to work with fabric scraps,
either out of necessity or curiosity. These works engage with the economics of dress,
the painterly aspects of the textile pattern, and the hyper-materialistic urban society
of Lagos, marking a significant departure from the modernist generation. Uniting
these two strains of interpretation is a relationship to memory, in particular the

14
textile’s ability to commemorate individuals and events, to evoke the cultural past
through pattern and technique (whether that past is real or imagined), and to serve
as witness and document to the lives and bodies it touched.

Based on the analysis of the cultural production and phenomena stated above, this
dissertation argues that the textile, though a modern form of visual and artistic
expression in and of itself, was reconceived by artists and other cultural actors
throughout the 20th century as symbolic of a "traditional" culture and past-time to
highlight the modernity of their own production and construct a cultural identity during
the formation of the independent nation of Nigeria. In turn, such conceptualizations
formed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s provided the material against which artistic
appropriations of textiles in the late 20th and early 21st century were positioned.
Instead of using the textile as a symbol of the past or an icon of nostalgia for pre-
colonial culture, contemporary artists and designers focus on the modernity of the
textile itself, its embedment in contemporary society, and its continuity within the
visual landscape and historical narrative of Yoruban and Nigerian culture.

Reading Art and Writing Art History through Textiles: A methodological

approach

Thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true
storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. 3

Textiles, like texts, like paintings, have much to say when closely read. After all, the
words text and textile share in their etymological root of the Late Latin texere
meaning "to weave, to join, fit together, braid, interweave, construct, fabricate, build”
while the metaphor above reveals the close associations between the skills of
weavers and storytellers.4 Certainly these ancient associations influenced the
numerous modern writers and thinkers that have adopted the metaphor of weaving
and its opposite of unraveling for the construction (or deconstruction) of the written

3
An ancient metaphor reprinted in Bringhurst. Additionally, the written page was called a
textus, meaning “cloth.” See: Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, 3rd ed.
(Vancouver: Hartley & Marks, 2004), 118.
4
“Text,” Online Etymology Dictionary, 2016,
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=text.
15
word.5 Yet, a textile is always more than the sum of its threads. Reading a textile
entails an intense scrutiny of its production method be it woven, dyed, or otherwise,
but this must be done in conjunction with a historical, cultural and sociological
contextualization of that production and its use, as well as a visual analysis of its
patterns and aesthetics, or rather acquiring a fluency in its pattern language. Such
readings can be applied equally to mass-produced factory prints as they are to rare,
handmade, antique pieces. Given the capacity for cloth to communicate quite literally
on behalf of the wearer in some West African societies, the metaphors linking textile
technologies to writing or telling stories gain traction in non-Western contexts.6

Unfortunately, few textile objects or practices have undergone such comprehensive

scrutiny. Until the late 20th century, textile objects were typically the domain of
ethnographic and anthropological study, and written about from the viewpoint of the
researcher rather than the producer. The texts typically provided detailed
information about how the textile was made and the function it served in the culture
or society that produced it. Several studies of this nature on adire are referenced in
this text for their valuable information on technique, but they tend to eulogize the
practice, lamenting how the state of the industry in the 1970s or 80s pales in
comparison to the way it was in the past. Such nostalgic sentiments recall James
Clifford on the writing of marginal people by the West. Often a product of the
Western imagination within ethnographic study, he writes, "these suddenly
"backward" peoples no longer invent local futures. What is different about them
remains tied to traditional pasts, inherited structures that either resist or yield to the
new but cannot produce it."7 In other words, in the eyes of the West, modernity
robbed the products (and people) of their authenticity or true essence.

5
See for example Derrida's re-reading of Plato's Pharmacy via the paradigm of the weaver.
He also uses the metaphor of the embroiderer, the seam, the thread, and the fold in the
same text: Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Reprint (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1981).
6
This is well documented in a number of sources regarding a number of different textiles.
See for example: Lisa Aronson, “The Language of West African Textiles,” African Arts 25,
no. 3 (July 1992): 36–40.; Susan Domowitz, “Wearing Proverbs: Any Names for Printed
Factory Cloth,” African Arts 25, no. 3 (July 1992): 82–87.; Doran H. Ross, “Asante Cloth
Names and Motifs,” in Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity
(Los Angeles, CA: University of California, 1998), 107–26.
7
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture : Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 5.
16
Clifford's study, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art (1988), turned the lens of ethnography back on the West. In a
self-reflective critique of the relations between the West and other societies and
cultures, Clifford examined how those relations were composed through the tactics
and tools of anthropological, historical and ethnographic disciplines, as well as
through the institutional treatment of art and cultural objects. In a number of ways,
The Predicament of Culture was deeply influential on my own study. With regards to
adire and African textiles in general, a "product" largely written about by Western
scholars in the 1960s - 1980s, Clifford's model guided my reading of early texts on
these subjects, particularly where many blatantly committed the blunders of which he
is critical, such as the framing of Yoruba cultural production as a vanishing tradition
to be salvaged. More importantly, however, Clifford exposed the structures of power
underlying the observation, analysis and writing about one culture by another. The
hierarchies that were constructed in ethnographic projects revealed a persistent
euro-centrism grounded in Western biases, desires, and inventions that were
intimately linked to the structures and functions of colonization. As I will argue at
numerous points throughout the chapters that follow, Western bias and values
concerning the textile are implicated in the study and reception of African art and
culture in the west.

Clifford's work also helped clarify the connections between ethnographic studies and
the treatment of the textile as an artistic appropriation. At some point during the
course of the 20th century, the adire industry came to be seen as a quaint, domestic
activity of Yoruba women rather than the economic powerhouse of textile industry it
once was. One scholar, for example, writes, “Patterning the cloth is a home industry
and often a baby is tied to the worker’s back while other children play about her.”8
Others ascribe the intellectual property of the textile's designs to traditions passed
from one generation to the next, effectively diminishing the agency of the artist in any
formal and creative choices that go into the making of the cloth: Polakoff claims, the
artist “employs a feather, continually dipping it into the bowl of paste, as she outlines
and carefully fills in the traditional designs which have become part of her childhood

8
Esther Warner Dendel, African Fabric Crafts: Sources of African Design and Technique
(Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1974), 122.
17
legacy, acquired from her mother or another woman within the family compound.”9
Decades later, Gillow writes of hand-painted adire, “The patterns used are generally
traditional ones handed down with very little change from mother to daughter.” 10
These descriptions and the texts they came from not only ignore the fact that many
popular adire patterns were inventions of the 20th century, but they refuse to analyze
the relationship between adire and its place of production in the "domestic sphere."
Rather than a craft best suited for a woman who was already bound to the home by
her children and household duties, adire production requires weeks, if not months, of
careful preparation in a stable environment. This included the delicate fermentation
process of natural indigo dye that entailed expert knowledge of its chemical
composition, as well as the patterning, dyeing, drying, re-dyeing, and color-fasting of
large quantities of cloth. The labor-intensive process of preparing a cloth for sale on
the domestic market, or for export, required both extensive knowledge by those
directing the process, and the work of family members, children, and indentured
laborers to fulfill all the necessary tasks from start to finish. These divisions of labor
took place throughout large, open-air complexes that included homes, rather than
inside private domestic interiors.

Of course, this is hardly the image of adire production one gains from reading about
it. Instead, domesticity and matrilineality are deprecatingly reframed to trivialize the
practice. The result is an enduring image of an insular, static, feminine craft.
Although misleading, this image suited the modern artist whose search for a symbol
of a "pure" and "traditional" culture was fulfilled by the indigenous textile, whose own
modernity or interculturality was previously undermined by studies such as the ones
quoted above. At this point of appropriation or overlap between genres, the "fine"
arts become complicit in the subordination of the textile, even where they profess to
"celebrate" or "honor" it through inclusion. By extension, the work of women, and the
work of the uneducated craftsperson are undermined as well. This continues at the
point where the textile, as well as the artwork that adopted its image or material, land
in the Western museum space and their value is negotiated all over again by
institutional methods of categorization, collection, and exhibition.

9
Claire Polakoff, Into Indigo : African Textiles and Dyeing Techniques (n. p., 1979), 62.
10
John Gillow, Printed and Dyed Textiles from Africa (London: The British Museum Press,
2001), 17.
18
At this juncture of art and textile, artistic and curatorial practice, Clifford's internal
critique extends to the discipline of art history, which has had a problematic
relationship with textiles as well as non-Western art for well over a century. Thus,
this study straddles the fields of anthropology and art history in that it considers the
production of textiles in an expanded perspective that exceeds the canons of both
fields. This expansion is achieved both by the artworks that integrate textile media
and language, but it is also integrated into the arguments posed in the following
chapters that first assert the position that adire textile practice was modernized in
technique and image in the late 19th century, and second, that the negation of this
modernity was integral to both the conceptualization of the non-Western textile in
Western cultural anthropology, as well as to the formation of a modern art in Nigeria
for which the textile, and other forms of "traditional" culture served as modernity's
non-modern "other."

Implicated within the problematic relationship of textiles to both fields of anthropology

and art history is the question of gender. In order to understand the
conceptualization of Nigerian textiles by Western scholars as domestic craft, to
locate it in an extended framework of art and culture that addresses the disciplinary
gap in which it exists, one must look back to the trajectory of the textile within the
West's art historical narrative. This narrative reveals that the division between high
arts and textiles did not always exist. Rather, the production and embellishment of
textiles came to be associated with "women's work" and femininity following a
gradual split in the Middle Ages in Europe. Practiced by both men and women,
embroidery, for example, was considered in medieval England to be a form of high
art. Tapestry weaving was also once an esteemed art form practiced throughout
central Europe predominantly by men. The question remains then, how did textile-
based practices become synonymous with women's cultural production, and thereby
relegated to the margins of Western art history? As with Clifford's ethnographic study
of the West, a self reflective lens on art history exposes a gradual, systematic
structuring of values that subtly empowered one group (in this case men) while it
subordinated another (women).

In order to unpack this hierarchy as it relates to textiles, this study draws upon the
body of feminist art history that has dealt with the overlap between gender and
genre. It looks to the relationship between women and the type of work they produce
19
to understand how this art has been consumed and written into (or out of) the art
historical narrative. This line of thought was developed in the early 1980s largely
through the work of Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker. Cultural theory of the
1970s, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and the writing of Michel Foucault that
exposed the hegemonies and hierarchies that actively defined a discourse heavily
influenced their work. Pollock and Parker's 1981 book Old Mistresses: Women, Art
and Ideology was significant in a number of ways. For one, it made a departure from
the seminal essay of feminist art history of 1971 by Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There
Been No Great Women Artists?" Nochlin had concluded in her essay, rather
optimistically, that gender discrimination happened in the past and thus the
imbalance experienced in the late 20th century in the field of art history when women
were almost non-existent in textbooks and major institutional collections and
exhibitions was an end result of this prior discriminatory practice. By contrast,
Pollock and Parker argued that rather than the "legacy of antiquated prejudice" the
erasure of women from art history was a modernist project with much of it taking
place in the 20th century. Despite concrete evidence of a shift towards the pejorative
in the language used to write about art made by women from the 18th century
onwards, they write, "Women were more thoroughly rubbed out of the pages of art's
histories at the very moment when through emancipation and post-World War I
social changes women were more than ever before active and visible in many public
and professional spheres, including art which many women embraced precisely as a
realm of new freedoms and self-definition."11 Although the same cannot be said for
women's emancipation in Nigeria because women's autonomy and rights were
reduced under colonialism, I will show that their erasure from Nigeria's art history
was also a 20th century project.

Pollock and Parker exposed a material and practice-based hierarchy in Old

Mistresses that produced clear-cut divisions between the arts and crafts, or the fine
arts and decorative arts that emerged slowly but resolutely alongside social
stratifications that ultimately bound women to the domestic sphere. Even in the later
decades of the 20th century, when art forms associated with women are "rescued"
by artists and curators, these genres could not escape the constraints of the

11
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, 2nd ed.
(New York, NY: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013), xxiv.
20
"feminine spirit," the essentializing stereotypes of femininity ascribed endlessly to
works of certain materials and genres. As Pollock and Parker argue, these
stereotypes are perpetuated for a distinct purpose: to provide an opposite against
which male artists find meaning and maintain their dominance.12

This mechanism of modernity and patriarchy in many respects can be found at work
in Nigeria where the advent of colonialism and modernism conspired to create a
value system within artistic and cultural production that placed sculpture, a male
occupation, above all else. The generation of artists that constitutes what is now
viewed as the late modernist period in Nigerian art history was overwhelmingly male.
The few women contemporaries that did exist were written out of the art historical
narrative in the decades that followed either by omission or a loss or lack of
documentation of their lives and work.13 The adire textile was not only envisaged as
an emblem of "traditional," indigenous culture, but also as craft, and thereby
separate from the production of art. Thus, although adire production continued
alongside modernist art, its producers were not considered as artists, and,
reconceived as a diminishing tradition, late 20th century adire production was viewed
as anachronistic or a measure in cultural preservation.

From these paradigms of male-female; modern-traditional; foreign-indigenous; art-

craft one can find numerous other parallels within the historiography of Western art
history. In addition to Pollock and Parker, I have benefitted greatly from scholars
such as Elissa Auther (String, Felt, Thread: The hierarchy of art and craft in
American art, 2010) who analyzed the resurgence of fiber-based media in American
art in the 1960s and 1970s, much of which was in resistance to craft's subordinated
position in the art world, even as influential art critics such as Clement Greenberg
remained committed to sustaining the hierarchical split between art and craft. Like
Pollock and Parker, Auther shows how forces of the 20th century made the split
between art and craft, and the subordination of artwork associated with women
profound and far-reaching. Along this same theme, but with a specific focus on

12
Parker and Pollock, 80.
13
See for example Agulu on Colette Omogbai in Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial
Modernism : Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2015), 252–56. See also, Peju Layiwola, “From Footnote to Main
Text: Re/Framing Women Artists from Nigeria,” N.paradoxa Africa and its Diasporas, no. 31
(January 2013): 78–87.
21
textile-based art, the essay collections of volumes 1 and 2 of the Reinventing
Textiles series edited by Sue Rowley (Vol. 1 "Tradition and Innovation," 1999) and
Janis Jefferies (Vol. 2 "Gender and Identity," 2001) provided specific examples of
how developing textile theory was applied to textile-based artworks or practices
throughout the world. Another text that was published a year prior to the Reinventing
Textiles series is Material Matters: The art and culture of contemporary textiles,
edited by Ingrid Bachmann and Ruth Scheuing (1998). These three essay
compilations that address specific artists and their textile-based practices have
served as models for how to approach such practices in a field that still struggles to
get its bearings. Specifically, the essays provide a wide range of debates that
surround the textile, which refreshingly expand the discourse beyond the sometimes
inescapable analytical lens of gender and femininity. These essays are particularly
useful in the third and final chapter where the relationship of the textile to themes of
consumerism, cultural history, and collective memory are explored and questioned.

As none of the above resources address textile-based practices in West Africa, I

have gained immensely from the example of Nkiru Nzegwu, whose cutting analysis
of appropriations of the Igbo women's art of uli by male modernist artists in Nigeria
presents one of the only challenges to the previously unquestioned access to
women's cultural production assumed by this generation of artists. In the essay
"Crossing Boundaries: Gender transmogrification of African art history" (2000)
Nzegwu also targets the exhibition of these male artists by a white male curator at
the National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C., which, she argues,
perpetuates several issues raised by the artworks themselves, and exacerbates a
gender imbalance by excluding a number of important female artists from the
exhibition. Her scathing critique of the Western exhibition of male Nigerian artists
serves to illustrate how feminist theory can be employed to address racial, colonial,
and cultural systems of oppression as much as it is used to address patriarchy as an
extension of Western instruments of domination and entrenched in the current
Nigerian social order. This text has also provided an important precedent in terms of
writing about Nigerian modernist art from a feminist perspective. Much of the
literature concerning the work produced in 1960s and the 1970s is written by the
artists themselves, or are laudatory accounts of the artists’ achievements written
predominantly by male critics and historians, many of whom were commissioned by

22
the artists themselves. The few women artists active in that time period have been
nearly written out of Nigeria’s Modern art history through exclusion from exhibitions,
a lack of documentation, as well as cultural attitudes towards women’s roles in
society.14 Some of those roles did indeed include producers of visual culture. In fact,
this is the point from which Nzegwu commences her critique of the appropriation of
uli, an art form practiced by Igbo women in Eastern Nigeria, by mostly male Nigerian
artists beginning in the 1940s. Uli comprises a visual vocabulary of body painting
executed in patterns that are heavily symbolic and proverbial in a unique, heavily
linear aesthetic. Nzegwu suggests, “uli may appropriately be seen as constituting an
“active voice,” used by women to engage in a variety of socio-cultural commentaries
on history and life.”15 Liberally adopting uli forms as decorative devices or as a guide
to a technical approach to linear drawing, prominent Nigerian artists from Ben
Enwonwu to Uche Okeke transformed the uli practice from bodies and homes to
paper and canvas, effectively shifting the practice away from communities of women
to the academy and depriving it of its communicative function.16 Along this same
vein, I will argue that modernist appropriations of adire patterns mute its
communicability and remove it from the context of female labor that produced it.
Further, the rhetoric of the Zaria Art Society, a group of students in the department of
art at the University of Nigeria, in Zaria, that called for “preserving” indigenous
culture through art echoed many of the anthropological studies of the mid- to late
twentieth centuries that suggested adire was a dying practice, and called for its
rescue.17 However, such suggestions and rhetoric (though based on some evidence
of production decline) greatly overshadow if not ignore entirely the evidence of
adire's modernity, and its perseverance by adaptation and change.

Nzegwu's questioning of the intentions and outcomes of the act of appropriation of

uli, and their exhibition in the institutional space of a prominent museum in the United
States uncovers various examples of taking liberties. These acts, committed by male

14
For an overview of this issue see: Layiwola, “From Footnote to Main Text: Re/Framing
Women Artists from Nigeria.”
15
Nkiru Nzegwu, “Crossing Boundaries: Gender Transmogrification of African Art History,”
Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World 1, no. 1 (2000): 3.
16
Nzegwu, 3.
17
In the introduction to Stanfield and Simmonds’ edited text on adire, for example, they
indicate “Jane Barbour’s section stemmed from a desire to save the adire patterns for
posterity”. See Jane Barbour and Doig Simmonds, eds., Adire Cloth in Nigeria (Ibadan,
Nigeria: The Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 1971), 6.
23
"modernist" artists against female "traditional" artists, and again by Western curators
who assume the imperialist position of creating knowledge about the Igbo, indicate
the intersection of gendered and ethnographic othering. Her essay, along with the
writings of artists and cultural anthropologists that speak to the drive towards
"preservation" inspired my own analysis of the act of appropriation as a means of
self-modernizing. Within this line of thought, Hal Foster's essay "The Artist as
Ethnographer" (The Return of the Real: the avant-garde at the end of the century,
1996) was also useful for its multiple examples drawn from contemporary art practice
that test the limits of access and the definitions of alterity, where artists find
themselves in the position of ethnographer, and thereby acting problematically as
patron to an "other."

Finally, I have borrowed from Theodor Adorno's concept of the museal (Prisms,
1967), as a way of thinking through the transformation that occurs when a textile is
taken from its original context and appropriated as subject matter into an artwork, or
as an object of collection and exhibition by an institution.

Methods and Field Research

Based on the major gap in scholarship on textiles, the inadequacy of the materials
that do exist, and the seeming lack of artists represented in the West who were
working in the African continent, in this case in Nigeria, a great deal of primary
source research for this thesis took place in Lagos, the heart of the Nigerian art
scene, and in other locations throughout southwestern Nigeria. The aim of two stays
in the city of Lagos was to first find out if there were artists working with textiles and
fibers, and secondly to begin building up information about their practices through
interviews, studio visits, exhibition visits, close examination and documentation of
their work, and collecting Nigerian print media that was unavailable abroad. During
the first trip to Lagos in June 2012 as a fellow with the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin
Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF) I was introduced to key contacts in the local art
scene that helped identify numerous artists that had worked with textiles at some
point in their careers. During this trip I was also able to interview Bruce
Onobrakpeya, a key figure in the modern arts, and quite possibly the first to integrate
textile patterns into painting. A second, and longer stay in Lagos took place over five
months in 2014. During this time I was a research assistant at the Centre for

24
Contemporary Arts, Lagos (CCA). Not only was the staff at a transitional phase
between exhibitions of Kelani Abass and El Anatsui, two artists whose work deals
with textiles in a variety of ways and are addressed in this thesis, but the connections
established through the CCA deepened my knowledge and understanding of a
significant trend in Nigerian art that was often entirely absent from the Western
exhibitions that purportedly covered this very overlap between African art and
textiles.

After this period of interviewing and surveying the scope of the textile-art genre, I
narrowed down my focus to artists who had used printed and dyed textiles in their
work as opposed to woven ones such as aso-oke. This selectivity served several
purposes: first and foremost, focusing on adire opened up a world of a modern textile
production. As I will discuss at length in the 2nd chapter, the development of painted
patterning was a fundamental aspect of its modernity. Thus, unlike the borrowing of
woven motifs, the appropriation of painted patterning into art was, I argue, the
appropriation of one modern image into another. Narrowing the focus to painted and
printed textiles also allowed me to see the continuity between the appropriations of
the late modernist generation, the schools of batik revival, and the ubiquitous use of
African print cloth beginning in the 1990s. It goes without saying, the selection also
helped to make more manageable the scope and quantity of artists and artworks
included in the study, as well as to engage with the question of gender, which
emerged as an undercurrent of several works that appropriated adire.

Due to the prominence of adire in this study, it became necessary to delve quite
deep into the history of adire production in order to analyze the modern and
contemporary work in which it is incorporated. For the purpose of gaining a deeper
understanding of adire's history as well as its current state, I travelled to Ibadan and
Abeokuta, two towns that were formerly major dyeing centers during adire’s heyday.
Guided by Nike Okundaye, the woman credited with reviving adire production in
Nigeria, along with some of her staff, I also travelled to Oshogbo and Ogidi where
she has established workshops that train men and women in indigo dyeing and other
arts. During these trips, I visited markets, spoke with the women selling adire,
interviewed the heads of two textile producing compounds in Abeokuta, and
accessed the archives of Nigeria Magazine, the Nigerian Field and other published
materials at the National Archive in Ibadan in a search for more information about
25
adire and its 20th century transformation from a primarily tie-dyed fabric to a painted,
stenciled and sewn one.

Although the site of production for adire was important, many of the objects studied
in the course of this research were held in museum collections in Britain, the U.S.
and Germany, the same institutions where I was first exposed to artistic
appropriation of textiles. This was one of the reasons I spent the second half of 2014
in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where I had access
to the resources of the British Museum, multiple libraries and archives, and where
numerous Nigerian artists had established their artistic practices. Thus, this study
was built from multiple sites: the Western exhibition and academic spaces where
both textiles and artworks are displayed, canonized, analyzed and evaluated, as well
as the sites of contact with artists actively working today. On many occasions, when I
was not in Lagos these interactions took place in London, Berlin, Dakar or other
European and African cities where their work was being shown or where they had
taken up an artistic residency. These sites and experiences were external to Lagos,
yet were formative for the development of their work. A great deal of the research
concerning contemporary artists, particularly those less known, also relied on digital
platforms. Where borders and distance made personal meetings difficult, contact
with artists was established or maintained over Facebook chat, WhatsApp
messages, email, and Skype. I monitored their personal blogs and websites for new
posts relevant to their work, found artists’ videos on YouTube and Vimeo, and stayed
abreast of exhibitions, new works, and other developments by following Facebook
feeds, Instagram, and a number of digital publications.

Literature Review

The process of compiling and reviewing the literature for this research which deals
specifically with artworks produced in Nigeria that appropriate textile imagery or
material posed a similar ad-hoc venture to the academic subject of textiles. The
majority of the texts that deal with this topic are catalogues produced for exhibitions
that explored textile-based art by African artists. Although some books address
textile-based art within a text dedicated to African textiles, such as Chris Spring’s
African Textiles Today (2012), the inclusions of artist appropriations is typically

26
treated as a peripheral subject. A book written exclusively on this specific practice of
textile appropriation by West African artists has not yet been produced, although the
sheer number of artists in the region that would fall under such a rubric would easily
provide enough material for a book. The exhibitions, which are reviewed in chapter
one, were among the first of their kind in the field of African art. More often than not,
the texts reflect this nascent stage; they demonstrate the lack of critical resources
their authors had to draw upon, and they often fail to produce the rigorous
scholarship that the work deserved. The exhibitions also tended to focus on the work
of artists working outside the continent who had already established their reputation
in the international art world. This meant that artists who had produced work with
connections to the textile on the continent prior to these decades were largely
excluded. Thereby, the artists of the 90s and 00s generation were assumed to be
working in an entirely new artistic genre without precedent.

In order to both address these issues within scholarship on this practice as well as
attempt to trace its origins, and provide a more in-depth contextualization, this study
looks back to the modern era and borrows from various sources for a comprehensive
look at the appropriation of print-textiles in Nigerian art. First, the literature produced
specifically about adire is reviewed and analyzed, followed by surveys on African
textiles, relevant collections of essays related to textiles and dress, and finally,
resources on adire and Nigerian textiles outside the field of art history. Secondly, the
texts concerning Modern African art, especially those which address artists included
in this study, are also reviewed.

Western interest in Nigerian textiles reached an initial apex in the 1960s, a time
when the newly independent nation was optimistic about the future and was looking
to indigenous material culture as a source of national pride. Numerous European
scholars undertook field research on Yoruba textiles. Susanne Wenger and Ulli Beier
published the first focused study on adire in 1957 in an article in Nigeria Magazine.
The next major text was Jane Barbour and Doig Simmonds’ Adire Cloth in Nigeria
(1971) that consists of five essays by five different authors, each one focusing on a
different aspect of the textile from an overview of dyeing methods and indigo’s
chemistry and history in Western Nigeria to the origins of some well-known adire
patterns and an explanation of one pattern’s transformations. Two of the essays offer
27
in-depth descriptions of adire production processes, as well as photographs of full
cloths and pattern details. The essay by George Jackson titled “The Devolution of
the Jubilee Design” is the first and one of the only of its kind to consider the origin
and subsequent transformation, or “devolution” as the author asserts, of a specific
adire pattern, the adire oloba.

Two later books about adire (Warner Dendel 1974; Okuboyejo 1987) offered little in
the way of new information. They focused more on aesthetics with illustrations of the
patterns in detail. These texts, along with several articles from The Nigerian Field,
Nigeria Magazine and textile journals on the same subject (Aremu 1979; Barbour
1989; Kalilu and Areo 2013; Oyelola 1992, 1993), as well as adire-specific
exhibitions (Traditional Adire Cloths at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria 1969;
Adire: Resist Dyed-Cloths of the Yoruba at the National Museum of African Art in
Washington D.C. in 1997; and Adire: Indigo cloth of Nigeria at the Museum for
Textiles in Toronto in 1980) comprise a base of information about adire that has not
changed much since Beier and Wenger’s and Barbour and Simmonds’ texts were
first written. They tend to take a formalist approach to patterns and offer technical
information about textile production. The same can be said for the survey texts
covering a range of indigo-dyed African textiles such as Claire Polakoff’s Into Indigo
(1979) and Jenny Balfour-Paul’s Indigo (1998). More recently, however, some
scholars have presented a more thorough and comprehensive account. John
Picton’s Art of African Textiles (1995), for example, reveals thoughtful consideration
of adire’s modernity while Pat Oyelola’s Nigerian Artistry (2010) offers a more up-to-
date account informed by her longtime presence in Nigeria and her continued
contact with people in the adire industry. Most recently, the daughter of artist Nike
Okundaye, Allison Davies, published a book called Storytelling through Adire (2014)
that includes some alternative interpretations of well-known patterns. This text
provides unique insight into the way a pattern may mean one thing to the dyer and
those who understand the pattern language of adire, and another to the foreigner or
outsider who either interpret it for themselves, or are offered an interpretation by
locals..

Despite large strides made in textile scholarship since the 1970s, several of the early
resources on the subject of adire continue to be cited by researchers, curators and
28
artists. At best, these resources provide accurate information about production
techniques and provide insight into the adire industry during the time the texts were
published. At their worst, these texts favor the authoritative opinion of the
author/scholar over the voices of the women who produce the textiles, highlight the
“traditionality” of the practice over its modernity, and give the impression that adire
production has taken place in a domestic vacuum and is in a state of decline and on
a path to complete oblivion.

These issues are not unique to adire, but are rather endemic to most scholarship on
non-Western textiles produced in the 20th century, and are especially evident in
survey texts. The texts included in the following paragraphs all include sections on
adire. The first of these references is a book published in 1979 by John Picton and
John Mack entitled African Textiles: looms, weaving and design that was published
alongside a survey exhibition of the collection holdings at the Museum of Mankind in
London. A second edition of the book followed in 1989 and Picton also went on to
write The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition and Lurex for an exhibition at
London’s Barbican Gallery in 1995 in which he critiques his and Mack’s approach to
the subject of African textiles in the previous two publications, remarking that the
current text moves beyond concerns with ‘traditionality’ and looks to a range of
responses on the continent to textiles as a medium of art.18 Several other
publications covering a breadth of the continent’s textiles include Christopher
Spring's African Textiles (1989; 1997) Duncan Clarke’s The Art of African Textiles
(1997), John Gillow’s African textiles: Color and creativity across a continent (2003),
and African Textiles: The Karun Thakar Collection (2015), yet these texts attempt to
cover such a vast quantity of material that the information they provide tends to be
redundant and dry. The three-volume Textilien aus Westafrika (1972) by Brigitte
Menzel provided unprecedented detail and illustrations about West African cloth, but
the language was difficult without an advanced knowledge of German. While
volumes 1-3 covered the technical aspects of the collection holdings at the Berlin

18
John Picton, Rayda Becker, and Barbican Art Gallery, The Art of African Textiles:
Technology, Tradition, and Lurex (London: Barbican Art Gallery : Lund Humphries
Publishers, 1995), 11–12.
29
Museum für Völkerkunde, a fourth and final volume intended to address the cultural
and historical significance of the textiles seems to have never been published.19

Survey texts also tend favor the same type of textile: the strip-woven cloth. The texts
tend to be weak in the same areas as well, such as in East African textiles, a subject
that is sparse in its material and documentation, an issue that these texts tend to
point out but not remedy. None have since matched the thoughtfulness and novelty
of approach as Picton (1995) who shows how the narrative of textiles “subverts and
overturns European pretence” and highlights how African agency shaped
engagement with foreign cultures.20

Picton’s text was prescient at a time when scholars were only beginning to reveal
that there is much more to these narratives than the technologies of looms and the
techniques of weaving or dyeing. For the most part, however, the literature on adire
or indigo-dyeing in Africa written from anthropological and art historical perspectives
tended to focus on the interpretations of patterns and production techniques while
circumventing the social, political, and economic contexts in which they were
produced. Certainly, such an all-inclusive, inter-disciplinary approach was hardly
common practice in the 1970s and 1980s but gained traction in the 1990s as the
‘social history of art’ became ingrained in the academic system and gradually
encompassed the field of visual culture.

This shift is evident in edited volumes of essays such as Dress and Gender: Making
and Meaning (1992) by Ruth Barnes and Joanne Eicher, Dress and Ethnicity:
Change Across Space and Time (1995) edited by Joanne Eicher, and Fashioning
Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (2004) edited by Jean Allman. These
collections did for some African textiles what these types of texts do best: brought
together diverse topics united by a single thematic thread and written by experts
from various fields and geographic specialties, producing more in-depth and rigorous
research in much needed areas. The texts also sought to find connections between

19
Michelle V. Gilbert, “Book Review: Textilien Aus Westafrika,” Africa 46, no. 1 (January
1976): 101.
20
Picton, Becker, and Barbican Art Gallery, The Art of African Textiles, 12.
30
distant cultures and sartorial practices along the lines of gender, social and religious
function, economics, and politics.

Outside the discipline of art history and anthropology there are two texts that take
entirely different and welcome approaches to adire. Judith Byfield is a social
historian who has written the most comprehensive account of adire’s modern history
in The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in Abeokuta
(Nigeria), 1890-1940 (2002), among other articles concerning the same subject
(Byfield 1997; 2004). The text examines fifty years of indigo dyeing in which the local
textile industry of the southwestern Nigerian town of Abeokuta is subjected to
unprecedented boom in the 1920s and bust following the great depression. Byfield
utilizes rich primary and archival sources from Abeokuta council and provincial
reports, trade records, collections of private papers and interviews that piece
together previously unknown perspectives of women in the historical narrative of
early 20th century Abeokuta. Unfortunately, her analysis of adire ignores its
aesthetics. This is precisely where textiles slip between the disciplinary cracks.
Disciplines like art history prioritize visual analysis over thorough contextualization or
historical analysis while other disciplines shy away from aesthetics either out of
discomfort, or worse, because in a hierarchy of information textiles or art are not
considered seriously as historical documents, nor is visual analysis considered a
rigorous, scientific method of extracting data. Nevertheless, this text provided
significant information for my own research, particularly for the second chapter
where the modern history of adire provides the crux for the argument presented in
that chapter that modernist artists highlighted the ‘traditionality’ of adire at the
expense of its modernity.

The second text, Colleen E. Kriger’s Cloth in West African History (2006), takes
significant strides to remedy the disciplinary divide. The book traces the ancient
histories of cotton, its transformation into textiles and their production and trade in
West Africa. Adire is included in the study, and Kriger uses it to support the
hypothesis (put forth in previous texts) that the Yoruba indigo dyeing practice is in
some way connected to the tie-dyed cotton garments preserved in the caves of the
Bandiagara escarpment and date to as early as the 11th century, as well as to tie-
dyed and resist indigo textiles from Sierra Leone (Bedaux and Bolland, 1980; 1991;
31
Keyes-Adenaike, 1993; Wahlman and Chuta, 1979).21 Thus the text brings together
historical data that indicate cross-cultural interactions that shaped adire’s early
production. Contributing to her argument is an entire chapter dedicated to the visual
analysis of an important painted adire pattern that offers clues to the cosmopolitan
nature of 19th century urban Lagos where the cloth was designed. Through this
visual analysis of a singular pattern, Kriger arrives at the same conclusion as Byfield:
that adire was modernized through a number of technological changes that took
place in the late 19th and early 20th century, including the development of hand-
painted and stenciled patterning technique. Her research adds that the hand-painted
patterns exhibit an acculturation of diverse foreign and regional sources.

Kriger’s arguments are significant for my purposes because they speak to both the
longevity of indigo dyeing, spanning a millennium, as well as to its multicultural
origins and continuity into the modern era. Her visual analysis also informs my own
study of another adire pattern, the stenciled oloba cloth that emerged around the
time of the first factory printed portrait cloth in the 1930s. Since this pattern appears
repeatedly in the work of modernist Bruce Onobrakpeya, whose work I analyze in the
second chapter, the oloba is used to both deepen the understanding of adire’s
modernity as well as to explore the relationship to factory printed portrait cloth,
particularly as they begin to appear in the visual arts in the 1990s.

Understanding the relationship between the adire oloba and the emergence of
commemorative portrait cloth became a key aspect of this study for the insight it
provided on the sartorial practice of aso-ebi whereby events or people were
commemorated by the wearing of a special cloth. Of the extant literature which
concerns commemorative and occasional print cloth in Africa there are a number of
general surveys that focus on or mention portrait cloth (Nielsen 1979; Spencer 1982;
Picton 1995; Picton 2001) in addition to informally published material such as
personal blogs22 that offer a digital collection, but these resources offer little in the
way of information substantial enough for in-depth historical or visual analysis.

21
Both Kriger and Byfield benefitted from the unpublished PhD thesis on adire written by
Carolyn Keyes Adenaike in 1993.
22
“African Commemorative Cloth: A Series,” The Tomathon Blog, accessed October 21,
2015, http://www.tomathon.com/mphp/2013/10/african-commemorative-cloths-a-series/.
32
Catherine P. Bishop’s article “African Occasional Textiles: Vernacular Landscapes of
Development” from 2014 is a welcome break from the usual treatment of these
cloths as strictly having political or nationalist agendas. Bishop focuses her analysis
on the representations of landscapes within many commemorative cloths that
appropriate symbols of modernization to communicate messages of development
and progress in a local, visual vernacular. While this article also does not go in depth
about the textile’s origins, it convincingly expands the notion of the function of the
occasional textile beyond commemoration and political propaganda to one that
expresses the values and wishes of the wearers, and by extension the values of
society.

With regards to Nigeria, there are a few articles that address specific commissioned
cloths for commemorative purposes within singular communities and cultural groups
(Akinwumi and Renne, 2008; Layiwola, 2009; Oyelola, 2007, 2012; Watson 2003).
Among these, Akinwumi and Renne's "Commemorative Textiles and Anglican
Church History in Ondo, Nigeria" provided a rare, in-depth study of the participation
of a church congregation in the commissioning and use of printed commemorative
textiles, while Watson's book Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan: Chieftancy and
Civic Culture in a Yoruba City provided insight into the political power and influence
of a portrait cloth. John Picton’s African Textiles: Technology, Tradition and Lurex
(1995) was the only one to make the important connection between the invention of
the adire oloba and the first appearance of factory printed portrait cloth for the West
African market. Steiner (1985) provided a vantage point on the preparation of
European cloth for sale in West Africa, while Erekosima and Eicher (1981) and
Steiner (1994) detailed processes of acculturation applied to imported cloth by
African consumers.

In recent years, modernity outside of Europe and the United States has received
unprecedented and overdue scholarly attention. Just in the years since I began my
research, new publications on the topic of African and Nigerian Modernism have
greatly expanded the discourse including Postcolonial Modernism: Art and
Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria by Chika Okeke-Agulu (2015) and A
Companion to Modern African Art edited by Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun
Visona (2013). One of the essays in Salami and Visona’s Companion is “Modernism
and Modernity in African Art” by John Picton in which he addresses (to a greater
33
extent than any scholar before him) the relationship between Bruce Onobrakpeya’s
work coming out of the Zaria Art Society and his appropriations of adire tie-dye cloth,
and adire’s modernity. Though this article addresses the exact same topic I address
in the second chapter, I present a much different interpretation of Onobrakpeya’s
appropriation, and also find problematic Picton's description of Onobrakpeya’s
process as bricolage in a later article titled "Fetishizing Modernity: Bricolage
Revisited" (2014). Okeke-Agulu's text focuses primarily on the artistic output and
ideology of the members of the former Zaria Art Society, that emerged in the late
1950s. Since I suggest that textile appropriations begin with Zaria Art Society
member Onobrakpeya's use of adire patterns, this text is significant for my purposes.
Both Okeke-Agulu and Olu Oguibe in an earlier article titled "Appropriation as
Nationalism in Modern African Art" (2002) take the position that such acts of
appropriation were nationalist in their aims and, according to Okeke-Agulu, that
artistic modernism in Nigeria was aligned with anti-colonial sentiment expressed
through the adoption of Western styles of painting to re-imagine indigenous motifs.
The problem with this position, I argue, is that like with the acts of artistic
appropriation by the Zaria generation, it places too much emphasis on the "creative
genius" of the male modern artist while depriving the indigenous artist of authorship
and modernity.

Some of the textile patterns discussed in my study are treated with equal attention
and importance as the works of art. In doing so I suggest that textile producers in
Nigeria were already masters of appropriation and localization of foreign visual
culture long before “Natural Synthesis” had been given a name. This has brought
me deep into the history of textile production, cotton and indigo trades, and into the
history of women’s lives in late 19th and early 20th century Nigeria, providing a stark
contrast to Nigeria’s history of art, in which women are glaringly absent. Indeed, such
a study of indigo-dyed textiles is also a study of women’s work. As the authors of
Cloth and Human Experience (1989: 4) Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider have
pointed out, the study of cloth is often synonymous with the study of women’s lives
and experiences, a perspective that is often overlooked. In this study, however, the
perspective of women provides a valuable framework in studying the production of
textiles and the production of art in Nigeria, where both are highly gendered sites of
creation with women dominating the former and men the latter.
34
On ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’

It is a generally well-established and accepted notion that, as Jean and John

Comaroff wrote in Modernity and Its Malcontents, “There are, in short, many
modernities.”23 The statement is predicated on the multiplying narratives that attempt
to counter the Euro-centric meta-narrative of a singular modernity that was
systematically exported to other parts of the world via imperial and colonial forces by
providing narratives of modernity from “alternative” or “other” people and cultures.
This challenge to the notion of a singular modernity is based equally on the variety of
ways in which people experienced the processes of modernization with variation in
different places, and the assertion that Europe’s modernity hinged on its contact with
and exploitation of people in those other parts of the world. However, even as the
modernities multiply through the efforts of researchers, the weakness of the
challenge lies in its refusal to first unpack and dismantle the primacy of European
modernism. The number of modernities has proliferated while the meta-narrative has
remained relatively unscathed, allowing Europe to avoid owning its colonial past, and
lends credence to Olu Oguibe’s claim that to “perpetually counter a center is to
recognize it.”24 What is needed rather is a complete rewriting of European modernity,
which, when re-written from a non-hegemonic viewpoint of cross-cultural contact and
interaction may in fact reveal more similarities than differences in the experiences of
modernity throughout the world.

The core of this rewriting must also acknowledge that “coloniality” as Walter Mignolo
argues, is “…the hidden agenda (and darker side) of modernity.”25 In other words,
modernity as a notion, a theory, a practice or condition has been constructed,
implemented and exported by the West. The task of deconstructing and de-centering
it is inseparable from colonial history.

In thinking about modernity in the Nigerian cultural context, colonialism maintains a

pervasive presence, particularly as the beginning of artistic modernity is generally

23
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, eds., Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power
in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xi.
24
Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 4.
25
Walter D. Mignolo, “Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity,” in Modernologies:
Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism, ed. Sabine Breitwisser
(Barcelona, Spain: MACBA Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 39.
35
accepted to have begun with the work of Aina Onabolu in the first decade of the 20 th
century when Nigeria was still a British colony. As the history of Nigeria’s specific
modernity is revealed further by recent research, it appears modernity is reserved for
the highly educated, well-traveled, predominantly male members of society. In this
uneven distribution there is a continued privileging of the Western experience of
modernity in the arts (i.e. painting and sculpture above all else) coupled with a
persistent association of the indigenous with the traditional. This dissertation is
neither concerned so much with identifying a style or cohesive body of works that
comprise a monolithic “Nigerian Art” nor is it concerned with ongoing discussions
about the proper application of terms like “Modern,” “Postmodern” and
“Contemporary” in relation to the arts. For clarity, where it is used in this text
“Nigerian art” or “Nigerian artist” indicates that the art is produced or the artist is
based in Nigeria. Rather this dissertation takes issue with the co-optation of
modernity in the arts along material, gendered and class lines, which, I suggest,
creates a facsimile of the patriarchal, hegemonic European model.

Efforts to expand the scope of modernism in Nigerian arts beyond Onabolu have
helped relieve some of the codependence on European modernity. The inclusion of
the late 19th century photographer J.A. Greene, as suggested by Tam Fiofori,
extends the reach of the ‘Modern Era’ chronologically to a time before Onabolu,
while also expanding the notion of what qualifies as art in the Nigerian context by
including documentary and portrait photography. This is needed; however, it merely
expands the scope by little more than a decade and does little to alleviate the male-
centric experience and foreign-media emphasis through its inclusion of photography.
John Picton has suggested that Nigerian modernity could be argued to have begun
during the Benin Empire (ca. 1180 – 1897) based on the changes in Benin court art
following the first contact with the Portuguese early in the 16th century. Court artists
began integrating these foreign traders and their wares into figural artwork. Frank
Ugiomoh has countered this claim saying that this would not be Nigerian modernism
but strictly Edo modernism.26 In my mind, this does not negate Picton’s claim, but
rather calls into question the validity of ethnic, national, or cultural categorization of

26
Akin Onipede, “From Aina Onabolu to Adagogo Green: Widening the Scope of Modernism
in Nigerian Visual Arts,” CCA Lagos Newsletter, no. 11 (April 2011): 9.; Frank Ugiomoh, “On
the Modern and the Contemporary in Nigerian Art,” CCA Lagos Newsletter, no. 11 (April
2011): 8.
36
modernisms. Indeed, the very notion of a plurality of modernities solicits such
problematic classifications. The value of Picton’s argument, however, is in the idea of
artistic modernity as a process of appropriation, acculturation, or synthesis of foreign
imagery as a result of contact with another culture, rather than a Benin-specific
experience or aesthetic. Much as the first European modernists radically altered their
painting tradition according to their exposure to art objects and cultural artifacts from
Asia, Africa, Pacific islands, and the Americas, Edo bronze casters wove foreign
culture into their own visual language. This focus on synthesis reduces the definition
of modernity (in the context of art) to the experience of intercultural contact
manifested through the processes of appropriation and adaptation. This definition
not only shifts the discourse away from euro-centric narratives but also expands the
inclusive potential of modernity beyond the royal, male, educated lines along which it
has been drawn in the past.

Intercultural contact was an experience in the 15th and 16th centuries that
transcended social and gendered strata. These experiences are evidenced by the
integration of new, foreign imagery in local cultural production in a variety of forms
across West African societies. Taking a position in alignment with Picton’s, V.Y.
Mudimbe explains, “The three trends in current African art--tradition-inspired,
modernist, and popular--are recent: the oldest examples date from the first quarter of
the century. One might be tempted, then, to relate their genesis to the impact of the
colonial era; yet a number of their themes and motifs--reproductions of crucifixes and
Madonnas, biblical references, and so on, all along the western coast of the
continent--are part of a history of acculturation that goes back to the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.”27

Throughout this text, I subscribe to this notion of modernity as emerging from contact
between two foreign entities, and artistic modernism as the visual, physical and
aesthetic production that results from the appropriation, synthesis and acculturation
of one foreign imagery into another. Bearing these definitions in mind, I suggest that
if we are to understand Nigerian modernism by synthesis (particularly late
modernism as it has been defined by the ideology of ‘Natural Synthesis’), then we
must consider the textile as a precursor to canvas painting and as a vehicle for the

27
V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 174.
37
processes of synthesis and as objects of modernist art and visual culture. The extent
to which textiles were instrumental in bilateral exchanges of material and visual
culture in centuries prior to colonialism is profound but not yet fully understood.
Nevertheless, this premise—that textiles played an integral role in the way West
African (in this study Yoruban, and later Nigerian) people came in contact with,
interacted with, and processed foreign culture—forms the bedrock for the
argumentation presented in this thesis.

On the Documentation of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nigeria

Nigeria’s art history suffers from a dearth of documentation covering artist’s lives,
their work, and any analysis of how their careers have contributed overall to the
narrative of the nation’s art history. Even significant artist movements and events,
such as FESTAC, have passed into history with few photos or first-hand accounts to
mark their existence.28 This is very problematic for the visual arts. Unlike music or
literature and other artistic forms of expression that live on in part by virtue of their
reproducibility and accessibility (especially in the age of the internet), the visual arts
often come in object-form, and are therefore subject to decay, loss, or theft, and their
value is intrinsic to their irreproducibility while their very survival and accessibility is
limited and controlled by the institutions and individuals who own them.

For women artists, textile artists, or artists working in alternative media, these
problems are pronounced by both historiographic and collecting practices that
actively exclude them. A recent text that focused exclusively on the collecting
practices of Lagos-based private collectors offers a recent example of a text that
commits the act of exclusion based on gender and media, providing a contemporary
example of Nigeria's historiography that perpetuates a male-centered perspective
and narrative. Edited by Jess Castellote, the 2012 book “Contemporary Nigerian Art
in Lagos Private Collections: New Trees in an Old Forest” begins by clarifying and
justifying the scope of the project: He surveyed the collections of dozens of Lagos-

28
Regarding FESTAC, this was a concern of both presenters and audience members at a
conference on FESTAC ’77 hosted by Tate Modern called “Across the Board” on April 18th
2014 at Terra Kulture in Lagos. The archives of FESTAC are held by CBAAC, which was
formed in 1978 for the purposes of documenting and archiving, but it was 24 years before
anything on FESTAC was actually published. Still today, there is little information about it,
and as of 2014, the FESTAC archives were not viewable due to CBAAC moving locations.
38
based collectors out of the 70 known to him, limited the selection to works produced
after 1985 by Nigeria-based artists, and only in the media of painting and sculpture
because this is what dominated every collection. Although the prevalence of
sculpture and painting in the Nigerian art scene and collecting practices existed
throughout the 20th century, Castellote admits that he noticed an increased interest
amongst collectors in multimedia, video and installation art and particularly
photography.29 Interestingly, none of these are included in the book. That any art
form which is not painting or sculpture is an alternative and less desirable medium is
not only projected as the opinion of all the collectors, but it is perpetuated as a
localized standard of art’s value by the selection criteria of the authors.

Castellote goes on to say that not only is there a preference for sculpture and
painting media, but there is a preference for the formal, for “beauty," and for the
human subject. Again, with few exceptions, these preferences are reiterated by the
selection reproduced in the text. At the same time that the text examines and
reproduces a narrow scope of artistic production, Castellote claims “…the fact that
the selection in this book includes works by over 80 artists attests to the breadth of
the contemporary art scene in Nigeria and makes more difficult the task of
highlighting only a few.”30 A similar statement in the essay by dele jegede postulates
“The collection that this publication supports offers a vital vignette—incomplete as
this may be—of the range of works in private collections.”31 The selection process
laid out in the first pages of the text clearly delimit any range represented in the text
as extremely narrow, essentially ignoring any diversity of works that may actually
exist in these collections.

Despite his initial claims that the text provides a vital, yet incomplete vignette of the
collecting scene, jegede laments that the number of women artists in the text’s
collection is “shockingly low,” and reflective of the unfortunate fact that there are not

29
Jess Castellote, ed., Contemporary Nigerian Art in Lagos Private Collections: New Trees
in an Old Forest (Ibadan: Bookcraft, 2012), 14.
30
Castellote, 78.
31
dele jegede, “Art, Currency, and Contemporaneity in Nigeria,” in Contemporary Nigerian
Art in Lagos Private Collections: New Trees in an Old Forest, ed. Jess Castellote (Ibadan:
Bookcraft, 2012), 48.
39
that many professional women practicing.32 The reasons for a gender imbalance in
Nigerian contemporary art are undoubtedly beyond the scope of jegede’s essay, yet
those reasons are much more than an unfortunate lack of women artists. The author
does not address how the practice of collecting may be exclusionary, nor the text’s
responsibility for its own terms of exclusion. Nike Okundaye, a painter, batik artist,
entrepreneur and gallerist based in Nigeria, is glaringly absent from the text, despite
being part of some of the collections represented, and being one of Nigeria's most
prolific artists. Although Castellote boasts about the inclusion of 80 artists, he also
states that hardly any locally based artists have visibility in global discourses, yet
Okundaye is a woman artist who has achieved success and visibility out of and in
the country to a far greater extent than most of the male artists represented.33
Further, by omitting all alternative media, Castellote omits nearly all of the locally
based artists that currently have global visibility, many of whom are women.

Such contradictions suggest a disconnect between the state of the art world and the
agency of collectors in the private art market, which, due to a lack of public funding
for the arts, amounts to the largest source of capital for artists in Nigeria. To an
extent, the authors seem unaware of their own complicity in a form of
inclusion/exclusion at work in their selection criteria. Their portrayal of collectors’
habits through the lens of their own compilation ignores any diversity that may
actually exist in those collections by treating anything out of the dominant order as
anomalies, and serves to sustain the prevailing notion that local collectors are only
interested in buying paintings and sculptures.

Another essay in the text by Tobenna Okwuosa confronts some of these issues.
Referring to several former students of El Anatsui who have been trained by the
artist in the art program at the University of Nigeria Nsukka and have achieved
international success yet lack local patronage, Okwuosa ascribes it to sentiments
expressed by a number of scholars that local artistic output is apolitical, ahistorical,

32
jegede, 50.
33
Her works are held at the Smithsonian Institute and the British Library permanent
collections and has been featured in prominent museums and galleries throughout the world.
40
less adventurous than the art on the international scene, and exhibits stasis.34 His
statement presents the opportunity for inward reflection on the causes of such artistic
stasis, in which private collection and uncritical art writing undoubtedly play a role,
but instead, Castellote ends the book in the same self-congratulatory tone in which it
began: “The vital importance of private collectors in the development of art in Nigeria
is not in doubt. They are the driving force behind the primary and secondary art
market, and they are the ones ultimately sustaining the primary actors: the artists.
Throughout their regular acquisitions, they provide most of the fuel on which the
engines of contemporary Nigerian art run.”35

By illustrating how women and artists working in alternative media are left out of the
art historical narrative, this text also answers one of the preliminary questions that
lead to the initial formation of this thesis: when and with whom did the practice of
appropriation of textiles begin in Nigerian art? This question was prompted by the
observation that outside of Nigeria there are a number of prominent artists whose
practices have become synonymous with the textile, namely, Yinka Shonibare,
Sokari Douglas Camp, El Anatsui, Nnenna Okore, Moyo Okediji, and Donald Odita,
to name a few. Yet, despite the associations these artists have with Nigeria, their
work is often interpreted through the lens of the traditional textile, rather than any
artistic practices of textile appropriation that pre-existed in West Africa. Castellote's
text, as well as other texts that survey the Nigerian art scene may serve necessary
documentary purposes but do not engage critically with the works they present or
attempt to contextualize them with the international art scene or figures such as
those just mentioned (Edozie and Bosah, 2010; Ogbechie 2012).

Textile as Medium and Subject

It would be inaccurate to describe all of the artworks addressed in the proceeding

chapters as “textile-art,” “fiber-art” or even “textile or fiber-based.” Although these

34
Okwuosa is referring specifically to many students of El Anatsui at Nsukka University, and
is quoting scholars Sidney Kasfir, Eddie Chambers, Chika-Okeke Agulu and Bisi Silva.
Tobenna Okwuosa, “The Contemporary Art Market in Lagos,” in Contemporary Nigerian Art
in Lagos Private Collections: New Trees in an Old Forest, ed. Jess Castellote (Ibadan:
Bookcraft, 2012), 89–91.
35
Castellote, Contemporary Nigerian Art in Lagos Private Collections: New Trees in an Old
Forest, 78.
41
schematic categorizations would apply to many artists that emerged from the
Oshogbo School (1962 – 1966) and could be loosely used to describe some
contemporary artists who work directly with fabric material it is neither the best term
to describe the practices at hand nor the thematic underpinnings of the work. There
is also the risk that artworks bearing such descriptions would be sidelined by the
“textile” label because of its associations with craft, women’s work or fashion. In
many of the works discussed, textile material is noticeably absent and most of the
works do not directly address issues having anything to do with textiles. Therefore
the label may not only be detrimental to the work, it would be mostly inaccurate. The
common thread that binds the works is rather an attention to the oral and visual
language of patterns, and an awareness of the social importance of textiles and their
documentary, commemorative, and expressive agency.

Out of the roughly two-dozen interviews and studio visits conducted for this research
with artists who have at some point in their career worked with textile material or
patterns, some common themes arose in the responses as to why they chose
textiles as media. The responses varied as widely as the nature of the appropriation,
but often the initial answer reflected a utilitarian sensibility: many artists began using
textiles because they had a lot of fabric around, often in the form of scraps left over
from tailored clothing that provided free material for experimentation. This
explanation frequently led to discussions about the widespread practice of tailoring in
Lagos, which produces a great deal of fabric waste. Cheap fabric imports from China
and other parts of Asia have made it more affordable than ever to make a new outfit,
but this has also contributed to rampant consumerism and waste. Aside from these
commercial and material explanations, artists also spoke about their work in various
terms of memory. Whether it was accessing personal memory by using the cloth
from the collection or garment of a loved one, or communal or cultural memory, the
theme continually resurfaced.

These two currents of commercialism and memory, which actually overlap and feed
into and off one another, help to explain why many Nigerian artists use textiles in
their work, and also help to better analyze the artworks themselves. Memory has
multiple definitions and dimensions that span the personal and collective, cultural
and national. This study draws on its many iterations through material culture,
sartorial practice, political strategy and artistic muse. Thus, I do not seek to define
42
memory in concrete terms but to utilize it as a point of entry, an analytical tool, and a
thematic current that connects artistic practice to the past by means of preservation
and reconstruction.

Chapter Summaries

In the first chapter, I review and critique curatorial practice as it relates to textiles,
African textiles, and African arts, especially where these phenomena overlap. In an
attempt to sketch a history of these practices and their developments, I draw
parallels between the Western reception of tapestry, textiles, and fiber-based art
(particularly those in the realm of feminist art of the 60s and 70s) to the curation and
reception of non-Western art and textiles. I also review problems facing textiles and
those who produce, collect, study, or exhibit them and suggest that when those
textiles are African in origin or by name, the same problems persist but are
compounded by the added complexity and attendant issues of the African label.36
One such layer of complexity is the orality of textiles in some West African cultures.
In addition to their visual language, some textiles are named or carry a proverbial
meaning; others carry double meanings in the patterns, only understood by the
producer, the wearer and the few who are aware of the message she is conveying.
Other textiles bear their meanings clearly through inscriptions and can be used for
commemorative purposes, inspiring the oft-quoted adage by American fiber artist
Sonya Clark and paraphrased by El Anatsui that “cloth is to the African what
monuments are to Westerners.”37

This chapter addresses a scholarly gap that lies at the interstices of African art,
textiles and textile art and feminist or “women’s” art and in doing so seeks to expose
the misconceptions and biases that stigmatized their reception in the mainstream art

36
The discourse over issues of authenticity and identity has been centered on contemporary
African art since the early 1990s (much of it came in response to the 1989 exhibition
Magiciens de la Terre) but are relevant to all forms of cultural production. Olu Oguibe argues
that the concept of Africa is one that has been invented in the Western imagination and thus
if this fictitious, hegemonic worldview crumbles so too does system of reference by which
African people and cultures have been cornered into. “If Africa is not some easily definable
species or category that yields to anthropology’s classifications and labels, neither are its
cultural manifestations.” See: Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004), 7.
37
Susan Cooksey, ed., Africa Interweave: Textile Diasporas (Gainesville, FL: Samuel P.
Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, 2011), 14.
43
world. It also provides a foreground for the following chapters that address the
practices of Nigerian-based artists and designers who have appropriated the textile
medium by framing their practices within the complex issues concomitant with both
textiles and African identity. The final section discusses the artistic procedures of
appropriation and montage as methods that connect textile production with artistic
production, suggesting that there are similarities in the ways that both modernist
artists and textile producers synthesize imagery from diverse sources in the pictorial
plane.

Chapter two is rooted in past practices. It explores the pasts of textile production,
and adire’s political, economic and social history, as well as the genre of Nigerian art
that falls under the umbrella term of Modern Nigerian Art. Chronologically situated in
the early and middle of the 20th century, the past is evoked as a historical and
cultural concept by artists, one that is intricately linked to cultural memory and
nostalgia. I argue that cultural memory, as a conceptual strategy of artistic practice
(and by extension cultural production), was not born with the Zaria Art Society but
was matured through the careers of its followers and has remained a critical
component of artistic practice into the 21st century, particularly in practices that
utilized the textile as media and subject matter. The printed textile, by virtue of its
ubiquity and commemorative function in Nigerian society, is a commonly
appropriated medium by Nigerian artists and designers serving both critical and
aesthetic ends. Textiles provide a platform where history, memory, visual and
material culture collide and are represented by printed graphics that constitute a
pattern: an image that is cheaply reproducible on fabric and easily disseminated in
the social-visual sphere via sartorial practice. The textile, I suggest, provides a point
of delimitation between the communicative and the cultural memory, a difference
marked by cultural memory's “distance from the everyday (transcendence) [that]
marks its temporal horizon.”38

38
Halbwachs probably assumed, as the authors state, that “once living communication
crystallized in the forms of objectivized culture…the group relationship and the contemporary
reference are lost”, memory becomes history. The authors contradict this, claiming that in
the objectivized culture connections to identities still exist. Jan Assmann and John
Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (Spring -
Summer 1995): 128 “Co
44
This difference is significant because in order for the artistic appropriation of the
textile to function as the artist intends it must shed its communicative memory, which
is based in the present, in favor of a (sometimes imagined) past. Situated in the
context of Nigerian society, the textile serves a similar function to oral history: in the
absence of text it tells stories, commemorates, symbolizes, and passes messages
from producer or wearer to viewer. In this context, the textile functions within and
through the everyday. By contrast, the appropriation of textiles into art effectively
removes it from the everyday, disrupting the flow of dialogue, exchange, and
movement, crystallizing into an object of culture that becomes fixed and risks
becoming what Adorno has called museal.39 This element of the museal arises in the
practices analyzed in the second chapter where it functions to allow the artist to
manipulate the textile's meanings.

The artistic, academic, entrepreneurial and design practices of the artists discussed
in this chapter are placed within the framework of the histories, objects and concepts
addressed in the first section. The focus on Bruce Onobrakpeya and Nike Okundaye
with more brief reference to other practioners is only a small sampling, but it provides
examples of different methods of appropriation of adire across a limited timeframe.
The modernist style of appropriating adire patterns, as practiced by Onobrakpeya
and Okundaye, operate in a commemoration and preservation of culture, which, I
suggest is often achieved by eschewing adire’s modernity in favor of its association
to “traditional” culture and the pre-colonial past. The contributions of these artists to
the development of a distinctly Nigerian style of art function in the formation and
preservation of cultural memory through the idiom of modernity under the guise of
tradition. This mode of artistic production is located in the distinctly Nigerian Modern
art credo of Natural Synthesis, which encouraged artists to combine indigenous
aesthetics and foreign influences to create a new art appropriate for a newly formed
nation.40 I discuss these works through the lens of Hal Foster's "The Artist as
Ethnographer."

39
“Once tradition is no longer animated by a comprehensive, substantial force but has to be
conjured up by means of citations because ‘It’s important to have tradition’, then whatever
happens to be left of it is dissolved into a means to an end.” Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1967), 175.
40
Uche Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Paris:
Flammarion, 1995), 208–9. The education that the first generation of artists trained at Zaria
45
The third and final chapter is situated primarily in the 21st century. It chiefly concerns
the phenomena of dressing in uniform (aso-ebi), portrait photography,
commemorative cloth, design and fashion as political statement, and the current
state of indigenous textile production in Yorubaland. These interrelated phenomena,
particularly of dress, photography and memory, are inspired first and foremost by an
experience I had while in Nigeria. When I was completing my five months research
trip in Lagos in 2014, I received a going-away gift from a pair of male graduate
students from the University of Lagos that I had befriended over the course of my
stay. Their gift to me was a photograph of the two of them. They paid a portrait
photographer with a small, makeshift studio on campus to take the photograph and
print it out. At first, I found the photo to be very odd. The men struck two, slightly
unnatural poses: one stood with a leg lifted up on a concrete slab with his arm
resting on that leg, while the other held one hand on a hip and rested the other on
his friend’s shoulder. They were both dressed in collared shirts and dress pants that
belied the hot and humid Lagos weather. Behind them, greenery from the
surrounding Lagos campus provided the lush backdrop to their portrait. Such a gift in
many western countries may be perceived as narcissistic, and one might assume
that the two men are in a romantic relationship. However, as I knew this was not the
case, the gifted portrait helped me realize the importance of photography in the
processes of remembering and being remembered in the social and cultural context
of Nigeria. The gift was significant for the way my two friends planned to have a
professional portrait taken, chose nice clothes for the occasion, and struck serious
poses that they, and presumably the photographer, believed would capture them at
their best. Ultimately, the objective of the gift was not just that I never forget them,

received was an arts training that was based on the Goldsmith’s School of Art’s curriculum
and was put into practice by faculty that were almost exclusively European. The founders of
the Zaria Art Society wanted not to abolish this curriculum but to inject it with indigenous
histories, practices and aesthetics. Uche Okeke, who wrote the Society’s manifesto, would
go on to lead the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Nsukka bringing his own
application of Natural Synthesis via the line drawing practice of the Igbo called Uli into wider
practice, and forming the conceptual basis for the Nsukka School. See Sylvester Ogbechie,
“Art Schools in Nigeria: Zaria and Nsukka,” in An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth
Century, ed. N’Goné Fall and Jean Loup Pivin, English language edition (New York, NY:
Distributed Art Publishers, 2002), 288–89. And Sylvester Ogbechie, “Zaria Art Society and
the Uli Movement, Nigeria,” in An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century, ed.
N’Goné Fall and Jean Loup Pivin, English language edition (New York, NY: Distributed Art
Publishers, 2002), 246–49.
46
but that I remember them well, which was why a printed, professional photograph
was made rather than a digital smartphone shot.

That gift stayed on my mind as I wrote this final chapter. In it, I discuss not only the
importance of dress in the social sphere, but the integral role of photography and the
portrait photographer in capturing those moments and those outfits that were made
especially for the occasion. In the first chapter, the adoption of fabric scraps as
artistic media for utilitarian and economical reasons is briefly explored. These artistic
strategies will be revisited in the third chapter. Although they appear to offer a
straightforward explanation for the prevalence of textile-based works, a closer look
reveals the connections to the popularity of aso-ebi and the capitalization of the
Chinese on the production of mass-produced imitation African prints. The
proliferation of cheap fabrics available in bulk has both supplied the demand that
aso-ebi creates, and fueled its rapid expansion beyond Yoruba social function,
phenomena that are explored both materially and conceptually by contemporary
artists.

These themes shift the focus of the chapter towards the textile’s role in sartorial
practice among the Yoruba and in contemporary Nigerian society. Dress, whether it
was a hand-woven aso-oke wrapper, a tailored buba of Austrian lace, or a suit and
tie from a London department store, was not only highly visual, but it was also
political, and mattered a great deal in the social context of Lagos, and to an extent,
Nigeria at large. One of the first fashion designers to implement a pro-nationalist
stance through fashion was Nigerian Folashade (Shade) Thomas-Fahm. Among her
designs that paid homage to local dress while incorporating modern improvements
were garments made of adire and other locally sourced textiles. Thus, Thomas-
Fahm represents not only an important precursor to the work of Nigerian fashion
designer Amake Osakwe of Maki-Oh, also discussed in this chapter, but she was a
contemporary of the Zaria artists, a member of the generation that lived through the
transition to independence, and an important yet overlooked figure in the formation
of a national modern aesthetic.

The findings reveal significant overlap in the symbolism of textiles in the realm of
fashion and social function and the symbolism of textiles in artwork of the younger
generations that succeeded the modernists. Designers and artists such as Osakwe
47
and Temitayo Ogunbiyi explore the links to history made possible with the inclusions
of adire in their work. Several decades into post-independence, the appropriation of
adire in contemporary works of art such as the multi-media installations by Ogunbiyi
and Osakwe’s designs demonstrate the ability of indigo dyed and printed cloth to
simultaneously evoke the past and reinvent itself in the present. Though the stylistic
and conceptual approaches differ greatly from artist to artist, the same concept of
memory remains a constant throughout generations of artistic production based on
the same adire patterns.

Thus, through the lenses of fashion design, 21st century textile production, cultural
practices surrounding dress, the political power of dress, and finally the integration of
textiles in contemporary Nigerian art, this chapter expands on the notions of
appropriation and synthesis explored in chapter two, but also argues that artists and
designers working in the 21st century have a different relationship to the material of
cultural heritage. Their aim is not one of preservation, but rather of continuation,
made possible by their own research-based interventions that made adire and other
forms of cultural production relevant today.

48
 CHAPTER ONE
The Trouble with Textiles: Challenges in exhibiting, appropriating and
theorizing an everyday material

Fracturing the Narrative

For the exhibition of the Barclay’s Young Artists Award of 1992, British-Nigerian artist
Yinka Shonibare exhibited a work titled, Installation. Hanging interspersed on the
walls of London’s Serpentine Gallery were square canvases wrapped in printed
fabric and painted in a manner that accentuated the fabrics’ patterns. Installation
evoked icons of Western modernist art in its sparse, seemingly haphazard
composition on the wall. The dispersal of small square canvases on a vast white wall
conveyed echoes of minimalism slightly at odds with the vibrant colors and bold
patterns of the fabric and the thick impasto of paint on the canvases. The fabrics
used in Installation were Dutch wax-prints that had been produced in Holland and
purchased in a London market. Shonibare knew that the textiles would be perceived
as African despite their complex history that starts with the Dutch imitating
Indonesian batik in the early 19th century.41 He deliberately offered viewers a facile
interpretation that seemed to be linked to his British-Nigerian identity. Sarah Kent, an
art critic from Time Out magazine, took the bait. She writes,

He creates a dialogue between minimalist abstraction and the brightly

coloured designs of African fabrics. The cloth is stretched as though it
were canvas and used as the support for swathes of dense pigment –
high art meets ethnic design. Numerous modern artists have been
inspired by ethnic art, but this is a dialogue of a different kind – between
Shonibare and himself, between his Western experience (he was born
and brought up here and studied in London art schools) and his distant
roots. Without being in any way didactic, the paintings raise questions
concerning the relationships between high and applied art and between
the first and third worlds.42

41
Shonibare utilizes Vlisco brand Dutch Wax Fabric, bringing to light the company’s history,
its initial interests in producing Indonesian batiks, and eventual success in the West African
market. See: Robb Young, “Africa’s Fabric Is Dutch,” The New York Times, November 14,
2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/fashion/15iht-ffabric15.html.
42
Sarah Kent, “Young at Art,” Time Out, February 12, 1992.
49
Kent sets up numerous dichotomies in her interpretation that distinguish between the
“high art” of the Western artistic tradition and “ethnic,” “African,” “third world”
production, unaware of the fabric’s European, Asian and colonial origins. Since the
time Kent’s review was published, critics have questioned Kent’s hasty association of
the fabric with the “exotic,” but of interest here is her automatic association of the
textile with the applied arts. Kent’s categorization of textiles as applied art sets them
in contrast to painting and other ‘high’ or superior art media. This is a reflex born of
the aesthetic values of the Western artistic tradition. It seems safe to assume, given
Kent’s description of the fabric being “ethnic” and African, that she did not think it
was necessary to investigate the cloth medium in question prior to writing the review.
Perhaps she thought, as many have before her, that textiles are not that important
and their makers are not really artists but designers, anonymous craftsmen and
women, or factory workers. Had she looked deeper, she would have discovered that
they are factory-made, but based off the handmade batik technique of applying wax-
resist by stamping or drawing with a spouted tool. This knowledge may have lead to
the interpretation of Shonibare’s work as a multifaceted subversion of the supremacy
of the Western painting tradition. By utilizing a non-Western form of painting to make
several references to the West (first in the reference to Dutch production of
Javanese Batik, second in Shonibare’s application of his own painted motifs on the
“canvases,” and third in his reference to minimalist painting in their installation)
Shonibare unravels the hierarchies in the narrative of art history and undermines
Western assumptions about African identity through what he has called a “deliberate
denial of the authentic.”43

At the core of this complex subversion is the textile. Yet, although the Dutch wax
print has remained central to Shonibare’s work, now twenty-five years after the
exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, much of what has been written about him
focuses on his challenge to the West’s idea of “Africanness,” which is conceived and
produced (like the textile) outside of Africa, rather than the West’s idea of the textile.
Certainly, the Dutch-wax print serves as both the vehicle for the artist’s confrontation
with the politics of representation and a symbol of the artist’s multi-cultural or hybrid
identity, but in order for the textile to operate so effectively in this role it is necessary

43
John Picton, “Undressing Ethnicity,” African Arts 34, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 66.
50
to also consider the general reception of textile material in the high art realm. Doing
so allows for an exploration of how gendered and racial biases of the Western art
world go hand in hand.

Within the vast body of literature dedicated to Shonibare’s artwork there is scant
mention of the significance of cloth as a medium that challenges the dominance of
both painting and sculpture utilized by feminist artists to challenge male domination
in the arts, even as Shonibare moved towards sewing and tailoring the fabrics rather
than painting on them. Nor is the notion of the feminine as it relates to the textile
addressed in analyses of his work despite the heavy reliance of many sculptural
installations on Victorian-era stereotypes of femininity. This is a significant oversight
considering that for many years Shonibare entertained an exclusively Western
audience, and the success of his work therefore hinges on the preconceptions his
audience holds about the symbolic and physical material he uses. Shonibare seems
to be as aware of these preconceptions concerning the textile as he was about the
audience’s ideas about ‘Africanness.’ Citing a personal interview with the artist, one
scholar credits Shonibare’s ability to use the textile in Installation to subvert modern
painting to his grounding in feminism.44 Though the author does not elaborate on this
statement, it suggests that Shonibare was aware of the historically feminist
appropriation of the textile in art to subvert the dominant order and he may have
developed his first textile work based on this knowledge. Elsewhere Shonibare has
cited Judy Chicago as an influence on his work, explaining that her practice and that
of other feminist artists of her generation were the first to challenge the patriarchal
way of producing and presenting art. Chicago’s use of textiles, embroidery, ceramics
and other forms and symbols related to women and femininity were utilized to negate
the heroism, grandiosity, and originality of white male painters, particularly of the
Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist styles that prevailed at the time.45 Shonibare’s
Installation also serves this purpose.

In his use of cloth to disrupt hegemonic narratives, Shonibare situates his practice
among the textile-based arts-- particularly those that sought to disrupt the male-

44
Robert Hobbs, “Yinka Shonibare MBE: The Politics of Representation,” in Yinka Shonibare
MBE (Munich; Berlin; London; New York: Prestel, 2008), 31.
45
“Profile: Yinka Shonibare, MBE” http://www.contemporary-magazines.com/profile89.htm
Accessed May 1, 2017
51
dominated art historical canon. Whether this was his intention or not, approaching
the textile in Shonibare’s work from a feminist perspective proves to be illuminating.
For one, Kent’s misapprehension of Shonibare’s Installation can be understood in
terms of the textile’s subtlety, which is, ironically, also the source of its subversive
power. Beginning in the 18th century, the once highly regarded art forms of tapestry
and embroidery began to take on new pejorative associations with femininity and
domesticity. By the early 20th century, the textile was perceived as devoid of
meaning and critical potential and ignored as a legitimate art form. Often relegated
as craft, which was distinguished from art early on by Immanuel Kant as being a
remunerative, labor-based art whose utility cannot be separated from its aesthetics,
textile and fiber works have fallen through the cracks between these two
categories.46 As one of the founding philosophies in the discipline of art history,
Kant's division of utilitarian and non-utilitarian production has had enduring influence.

Exclusion from the mainstream art world has also had its benefits, however. Its
perceived triviality has created in the textile a valuable, non-threatening material in
the art of subtle critique. Called an art world “Trojan horse” by textile scholar Jessica
Hemmings, artists throughout the 20th century embraced the textile’s associations
with craft, femininity, domesticity, and the applied arts, and used them as tools
against gender subordination and patriarchal dominance.47 Feminist artists turned to
the textile as their medium of choice because it offered the opportunity to reclaim
various arts denigrated as “women’s work” as legitimate and powerful forms of
expression and question the patriarchal system that formed such paradigms of
inclusion/exclusion in the first place. Embroidery, for example, has historically
provided a way of indoctrinating young girls into the feminine ideal, which lead to its
becoming “a weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity” in the arts.48
Artists have also taken up quilting, knitting, sewing, crocheting and weaving in similar

46
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988), 164.
47
Hemmings writes, “The textile may be understood to act as something of a Trojan horse
smuggling across these difficult and complex stories” in reference to the textile-based work
of Elaine Reichek. See: Jessica Hemmings, “Postcolonial Textiles - Negotiating Dialogue,” in
Cross/Cultures: Postcolonial Studies Across Disciplines, vol. 170 (ASNEL, Hanover,
Germany: Rodopi Amsterdam, 2011), 30.
48
Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, 3rd
ed. (London; New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2010), ix.
52
challenges to gendered and material exclusions, while art historians have sought to
identify and credit women from history who have worked in these media and whose
work has been appropriated into “high” art without their consent or due credit.49

As Shonibare employs cloth to move himself from the periphery to the center of the
art world by embracing the “otherness” imposed upon him by the West and exposing
its fiction, he does so by predicting what the (mis)perception of the cloth will likely be.
Emerging in the early 1990s, this places Shonibare at an important intersection
where African and diaspora artists were gaining unprecedented visibility in the art
world, with many using found or alternative media such as the textile. Such
junctures, where textiles and African art meet in curatorial practice and scholarly
publications, are the main focus of this chapter.

Exhibiting the Traditional: A survey and critique of textiles in curatorial

practice

Textile practices have been treated with disregard for so long it is almost
inconceivable for some critics and artists to acknowledge them as discursive
formations from which meaning can emerge.50

-Mireille Perron

Textiles from West Africa often undergo the same process of categorization as
textiles from any other part of the world once they enter a museum space. As objects
collected by museums and institutions, textiles are typically housed in individual
departments divided along geographic or cultural lines, rather than by a textile-
specific department. This is particularly true in the case of encyclopedic collections
such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Very rarely in these institutions
do textiles from one department’s collection intermingle with those from another.51

49
One of the early examples of this is Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s Old Mistresses:
Women, Art and Ideology (1981) that gave substantial evidence to the devaluing and
appropriating of women’s work, notably of abstract painters in New York utilizing designs
from Navajo women’s weaving.
50
Mireille Perron, “Common Threads: Local Strategies for ‘Inappropriated’ Artists,” in
Material Matters: The Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles, ed. Ingrid Bachmann and
Ruth Scheuing (Canada: YYZ Books, 1998), 124.
51
It was only very recently through the “Interwoven Globe” exhibition that this became
possible for the Metropolitan collection, and many textiles which are not easily categorized
under the usual precepts were exhibited for the first time through the collaboration of nine
departments. See: Roberta Smith, “‘Interwoven Globe,’ a 300-Year Survey of Textiles at the
Met,” The New York Times, September 12, 2013,
53
Rather, West African textiles are typically collected by the department for Africa,
despite the fact that due to global trade, they may have a lot in common with textiles
from other parts of the world.

Textiles also present challenges to curators because they occupy a unique position
somewhere between art and material culture. Within this limbo, they are consistently
treated as subordinate to art despite having both functional and aesthetic aspects
that make them objects worthy of collection, display and analysis. The reasons for
this subordination are partially rooted in the little value that Western society places in
objects that are made by and associated with women or that are anonymously or
collectively produced. Amelia Peck, editor of the catalogue for the Metropolitan’s
2013 textile exhibition Interwoven Globe explains, “Textiles other than tapestries
have traditionally been undervalued as works of art, overlooked sometimes because
they fall into the domestic sphere, their makers often anonymous and frequently
female.”52

The origin of this hierarchy that places textiles, decorative arts, and other forms of
craft has implications outside of Western collection practices. However, in the
context of West Africa, where the gendering of production differs from one textile
practice to the next, other principles have governed the collection and undervaluation
of textiles. For example, despite the fact that in West Africa many textiles are
produced by men and the textile plays more prominent roles in West African
societies, collections of African art and material culture have been shaped by a
Western preference for sculpture. Where textiles were collected, Western standards
of art and aesthetics were influential, as was an arbitrary idea of what comprised an
"authentic" African textile. Early collectors of African art and artifacts who made their
value judgments based on Western ideals of "high art" or "tradition" as it related to
African culture are in part to blame for the fact that today there are so few surviving
examples of textiles from the African continent that are over 150 years old. Of
course, the susceptibility of fabrics to decay from use and climate is a significant
reason why so few textiles from before the 19th century exist in collections, but there

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/arts/design/interwoven-globe-a-300-year-survey-of-
textiles-at-the-met.html.
52
Amelia Peck, “Trade Textiles at the Metropolitan Museum: A History,” in Interwoven
Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800, ed. Amelia Peck (New York, NY: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 10.
54
were also certain preconceptions about authenticity that likely dissuaded collectors
from purchasing and preserving textiles. Due to their contact with foreign influences
through trade, many textiles were not perceived as “purely” African, and were
therefore not highly valued or sought after collectible objects.53

Foreign influences included both finished textiles as well as raw materials for their
production that came to African markets through various transcontinental and
transoceanic routes. Guinea cloths, for instance, were finished cottons manufactured
in India, exported to Europe, and then re-exported to Africa's Guinea Coast where
they were exchanged for slaves and other commodities in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Rather than drive local production out of business, foreign imports like
Guinea cloths instead re-shaped and stimulated it.54 The West African market was
so strong that imports were also re-fashioned at the production site to meet West
African consumer preferences. However, early collection practices, institutional
categorization and departmentalization, and Western scholarship have together
acted to suppress the global trade narrative that shaped African textile production,
serving to obscure the modernity and inconstancy of many textile "traditions" in favor
of objects that represent a static, and thereby "authentic" product.

A major exhibition of African textiles in the United States at the Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA) in New York in 1972 illustrated how these Western values were
translated into curatorial practice. Although the exhibition attempted to redress
misperceptions about African textiles, the monumental show also highlighted the way
that a preference for "tradition" persisted even under the handling of art historians at
a museum dedicated to the modern arts. Curated by Roy Sieber, African Textiles
and Decorative Arts made a national tour after its first showing at the MoMA. A
dense, 240-page catalogue authored by Sieber accompanied the travelling exhibition
and illustrates the types of textiles and body ornamentation that were shown. In the
introduction, Sieber makes several statements that identify the shortcomings of
Western practice with regard to African textiles, but that also seem to forecast issues

53
Chris Spring, African Textiles Today (Washington DC; London: Smithsonian Books; The
British Museum Press, 2012), 212.
54
Colleen E. Kriger, “‘Guinea Cloth’: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West
Africa before and during the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Spinning World: A Global History
of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850, ed. Giorgio Riello; Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford; New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 105–6.
55
in his own curatorial approach: first he notes that the study of these “traditional forms
have been neglected by the West” in favor of sculpture, an act that “stems from
Western aesthetic values but results in a geographical emphasis on West Africa
where most traditional sculpture is to be found.” A couple paragraphs later Sieber
asserts that the objects in the exhibition have nearly all been produced in the last
century, some are more recent and even new, and “almost all represent technical
processes that are still in use and reflect contemporary African taste.” He goes on to
say, “the literature of African Arts has tended to deal with their “traditional” aspects,
implying that as they have become “modern”—that is, as they have come
increasingly under the influence of outside factors—they have lost an irreplaceable
élan.”55 Although he appears to be critiquing this tendency of the extant literature,
and countering it by exhibiting recent or new textiles, the rest of his text seems to
subscribe to the very same point of view on “modern” textiles, that they are somehow
of less value because of their modernity. His discomfort with so-called “modern”
textiles is suggested by the inconsistent placement of the term “traditional” in
quotation marks and the near exclusion of textiles that are not woven or are not
made of plant-based fibers.

Some resist-dyed cloths are included but only to “demonstrate the continued vitality
of the decorative arts in modern Africa.”56 The dyed fabrics made from imported cloth
are brought in to emphasize the traditionality of hand-woven cloth while any sign of
modernity in production technique or material in the hand-woven cloth is left out.
Post-1945, many hand-woven cloths formerly made with raffia, cotton, or silk threads
such as kente and aso-oke were made with semi-synthetic viscose threads. This
was primarily caused by a discontinuation of trade due to the World Wars that
disrupted the flow of cotton and silk to West Africa. In the meantime, synthetic
alternatives took their place. Yet even once cottons and silks were available again,
synthetics remained popular for their affordability, variety, and colorfastness, in some
cases greatly expanding the aesthetic possibilities of the weaving practice. During
the 1970s, for example, a shiny plastic fiber from Japan called Lurex grew
immensely popular for the shiny patina it produced, transforming the aesthetics of

55
Roy Sieber, African Textiles and Decorative Arts (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1972), 10.
56
Sieber, 220.
56
strip-woven cloth from Ghana to Nigeria.57 These transitions may signal to some a
loss of the “élan” or “authenticity” of the textile, but such a belief rests on the
assumption that the materials used prior to the synthetics were locally sourced, when
in fact they were mostly imported as well. In fact, one would have to travel back quite
far in time to find a textile that was not heavily influenced by cross-cultural trade and
contact. Such an endeavor would not only produce few results but would ignore the
agency of African actors in the vast network of textile trade prior to the arrival of the
Europeans.

African Textiles and Decorative Arts offers little such historical context or examples
of cross-culturality. With few exceptions, even the materials used in making the
woven cloths are not mentioned in the body of the text or the descriptions of the
illustrations.58 Perhaps in an effort to bridge the disciplinary divide between
anthropology and art history, Sieber opted to focus first and foremost on the
aesthetics of the objects. A review written about Sieber’s exhibition reveals that the
selection criteria for the 241 objects included in the exhibition (out of 2400
possibilities) were chosen based on their “aesthetic excellence in contemporary
western terms.”59 This may in part explain why, following a decade of Minimalism in
art in America, some woven pieces such as the muted palette and simple abstract
patterns of Yoruba women’s strip-weaving were well represented in Sieber's
exhibition when others, such as the boldly-colored, busy-patterned adinkra cloths,
were overlooked or omitted entirely. The criteria may also explain why Sieber offered
so little information or interpretation to the symbolism of the textiles’ color and
design. Selected purely for their aesthetic appeal, historical contextualization and
visual analyses of the objects were seemingly unimportant. The lack of historical
contextualization and research-based information on the works shown is evident in
the catalogue's scant bibliography. Certainly, at this point in 1972 textile research
was only an emerging field, and Sieber had limited and oftentimes flawed resources
to draw upon. However, he limited his bibliography further by selecting only English
language texts, resulting in an emphasis on Anglophone West Africa in the data.

57
Picton, Becker, and Barbican Art Gallery, The Art of African Textiles, 14–15.
58
Sieber only briefly mentions cloths that are still made in cotton or raffia today in Dahomey.
Sieber, African Textiles and Decorative Arts, 159.
59
Kate P. Kent, “African Textiles and Decorative Arts (Review),” African Arts 6, no. 2 (Winter
1973): 66–67.
57
Moreover, rather than utilize the data that was available to him to inform his formalist
selection, he merely replicates passages from other texts, including some that have
proven to be inaccurate and another that was plagiarized.60

Despite having the resources of the MoMA and other institutions at his disposal
Sieber’s exhibition and catalogue did not rectify the Western bias in exhibiting
African art by focusing on the textile as opposed to sculpture. Instead, Sieber’s
curatorial choices perpetuated a number of problems, which include an explicit
preference for West African strip-woven textiles, an emphasis on “traditionality” over
modernity, and an overarching theme of an “authentic” Africanity rather than cross-
culturality, all of which were shaped by Western tastes and have shown to have
lasting implications for the reception of both textiles from the African continent and
the contemporary artistic practices that have appropriated them.

Preferential treatment for West African strip-woven fabrics above all other textiles
from the continent becomes increasingly evident in the decades after the MoMA’s
seminal exhibition. A simple glance at the illustrations chosen for the covers of
numerous texts published in the West (including Sieber’s catalogue, though it is not
included in the image) on the subject of African textiles reveals favor for strip-woven
cloth with a particular fondness for the multi-tonal kente cloths of the Ashanti and
Ewe people of modern-day Ghana (figure 1.1). As these images circulate in the form
of academic and general-knowledge texts and exhibition catalogues, the strip-weave
cloth becomes increasingly emblematic of the textile production of the entire
continent, thereby constructing associations between this specific form of material
culture and a broad notion of an African aesthetic. In a review of the 1978 exhibition
at the Denver Art Museum called “West African Textiles” Carolyn Marr remarked
“Ashanti kente cloth is perhaps the most well known of West African textiles”
suggesting further that the brilliant palette and complexity of designs made the
Ashanti cloths easily distinguishable from others.61 Chris Spring also supports this
claim when he argues that kente “in many ways epitomizes the popular notion of an

60
Herbert M. Cole, “Review: African Textiles and Decorative Arts by Roy Sieber,” African
Arts 6, no. 3 (Spring 1973): 77.
61
Carolyn Marr, “West African Textiles,” African Arts 11, no. 4 (July 1978): 81.
58
‘African textile’: the great narrow strip hand-woven cloths of West Africa…” but he
neglects to discuss how this popular notion was born in the first place.62

Sieber believed that the Euro-American fascination with the West African strip-woven
cloths was directly related to the fact that most of the sculpture that first fascinated
Europe and America originated in West Africa. Yet, this explanation does not
account for the preference of West African woven cloth above all other textiles that
are also of West African origin. While the aesthetics of abstraction that had
dominated the 20th century of art in Europe and the United States to some extent
explain a partiality for woven cloth over figurative painted cloth, another explanation
may be found in earlier stages of Western art history. Tapestry weaving in Europe
was once a respected, predominantly male profession in the arts on par with that of
the painter, reaching its apex in the late Gothic period in France. Thereafter, the
profession gradually shifted from one of creative production to one of imitation
whereby weavers were tasked with creating tapestries in the exact likeness of
popular paintings by esteemed artists such as Raphael. Tapestry weaving thereby
forfeited much of its own creative license in pursuit of increasingly difficult technical
skills that allowed for more precision in the replication of paintings. This created a
distinction between the painter and the weaver, the artist and the artisan, and
ultimately placed the weaver in a subordinate position to the painter as his imitator.63

For over a century, tapestry weaving continued to be subordinated by the “high arts”
of painting and sculpture until efforts in England by the Pre-Raphaelites, William
Morris, and the Arts and Crafts Movement sought to restore tapestry to its former
glory. Morris successfully employed a number of male weavers to work in the
medieval style, but it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that tapestry had an
opportunity to intervene in the Modern arts. Under a man named Jean Lurçat,
backed by French cultural officials and a dealer, tapestry arts were brought together
under a biennial held in Lausanne, Switzerland. Lurçat and those working with him
wished to revive the great image-based tapestries of the late French Gothic era, but

62
Spring, African Textiles Today, 21.
63
Ann Newdigate, “Kinda Art, Sorta Tapestry: Tapestry as Shorthand Access to the
Definitions, Languages, Institutions, Attitudes, Hierarchies, Ideologies, Constructions,
Classifications, Histories, Prejudices, and Other Bad Habits of the West,” in New Feminist
Art Criticism, ed. Katy Deepwell (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press,
1995), 174.
59
by the second biennial in 1965 that vision had been compromised by a surge of
interest and entries from tapestry innovators, many of whom were women from
Eastern Europe and the United States. This created another divide between those
who wished to revive an art form by reproducing it in its late 17 th century likeness,
and those who wished to revive it by proving it was a modern art medium capable of
exploring and pushing aesthetic possibilities in the same manner of painting or
sculpture. The latter party eventually won over the biennial and the direction of the
weaving practice, but not without Lurçat making misogynist comments about female
tapestry artists ruining the profession, indicating a gendering of the split.64

This was hardly the first time that weaving was disparaged for its popularity among
women artists. Even as tapestry arts struggled throughout the 20th century in Europe
and the United States for legitimacy and visibility, weaving was exceptionally well
integrated into the curriculum of the Bauhaus in Germany. It outlasted all other
divisions of the school for the entirety of its existence from 1919-1933. Despite its
endurance, and the validity provided by contracts with textile manufacturing firms
won by the program, its mostly female student body was consistently treated with
hostility by the faculty.65 In the United States, textile-based arts were receiving
promising attention from the art establishment. Anni Albers came to teach in the U.S.
after leaving the Bauhaus where she was educated and served as program director
for some time. Her show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1949 marked the first time
a weaver was given a solo exhibition in a major institution, and her book On Weaving
from 1965 was influential for a rising group of artists working in fiber media.
However, weavers and other fabric artists working at this late stage in Western
Modernism succumbed to pressures of the art world to eschew all traces of the
traditional or the decorative in order to be taken seriously, leaving tapestry in the
position of once again imitating painting. Even when the artists were male, tapestry
struggled for recognition. A number of canonical male artists experimented with the
medium of weaving throughout the span of modernist art, including Léger, Picasso,
Matisse, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Man Ray, and
Josef Albers among others. Nevertheless, these and other works of tapestry were

64
Ibid., 175.
65
Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxiii.
60
largely written out of art historical accounts of the Modern era, and therefore
remained peripheral to the dominant media of painting and sculpture. 66

Tapestry never achieved its former high status as envisioned by people like Morris,
Lurçat or Albers, but it played a prominent role in the burgeoning field of fiber arts in
the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly within the feminist art movement.
However, even as tapestry and other textile arts gained new roles in critical
practices, the troubled relationship to tradition remained. Anni Albers’ efforts to
integrate weaving into modernist practice, for example, went hand in hand with
fostering an appreciation for ancient weaving practices and elevating the forms
beyond the classification of craft or ethnographic objects.67 Thus, as the textile
evolved into increasingly sophisticated conceptual and critical tools for artists in the
West, the fascination with non-Western woven textiles continued, and the objects
were looked to for their traditional techniques and uses rather than their meaning.
Exhibitions such as Raoul d’Harcourt’s ‘Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their
Techniques’ from 1962, and Sieber’s ‘African Textiles and Decorative Arts,’ provided
the narrow range of criteria that excluded those showing signs of modernization in
material or form, re-affirming misleading associations between the non-West and the
non-modern.

The association between textiles and tradition persisted in the years following
Sieber's show at the MoMA. In 1975, the Museum of African Art in Washington D.C.
showed Traditional African Dress and Textiles followed by a survey exhibition of the
collection holdings at the Museum of Mankind in London in late 1979, the catalogue
for which was the first edition of African Textiles edited by John Mack and John
Picton in the same year. The connections between tradition and textile in the context
of Africa were repeatedly made in these exhibitions and texts, even though the word
“traditional” had been dropped from the title of the London show and many of the
included textile “traditions” had long since undergone processes of modernization.
Thus even as modernized textiles were increasingly shown and recognized, they
were framed in an inferior position to their predecessors, recalling Sue Pritchard’s

66
For an in depth account of the extent of tapestry’s integration in Modern art, see: K.L.H.
Wells, “Tapestry and Tableau: Revival, Reproduction, and the Marketing of Modernism”
(University of Southern California, 2014).
67
Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art, 12.
61
claim that “…for many, the term “textiles” only has resonance if it refers to traditional
materials and techniques.”68

This denial of modernity extended to contemporary African artists working in the mid
to late 20th century. In the 1960s, Senegalese artists who revived tapestry weaving
utilized the motifs that Europeans looked to as emblematic of African visual culture
such as masks and statues, making them the subjects of re-appropriation and critical
reevaluation. Under the direction of Papa Ibra Tall, a leading artist of the Ecole de
Dakar, a new school for the instruction of weaving was opened in the town of Thiès,
Senegal in 1965. With the support of then President Léopold Senghor, Tall founded
the Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs (MSAD) with an interest in
developing the visual arts for the Négritude movement that took shape under
Senghor's presidency and his generous granting of 25% of the government budget to
arts and culture.69 The development of a center for weaving provided an alternative
to the easel painting that was widely practiced at the time but was reliant on the
importation of materials from France and on the French legacy of painting on
canvas. Conceptually, the weavings were rooted in the decolonial, Africa-centric
ideologies of Négritude and Senghor's idea of africanité. Tall’s tapestries, as well as
those of his colleagues Bacary Dième, Badara Camara and Ibou Diouf, reflected the
aesthetic sensibilities of the Négritude artists and the fundamental belief that
weaving was inherently an African art form.70 Although these tapestries are largely
absent from many accounts of the Ecole de Dakar, and were certainly not part of
Sieber’s nor any of the later exhibitions featuring artists working with textiles (though
they were important precursors), the case of Tall and the tapestry school is
significant for the way the medium was perceived and utilized as an alternative to the
dominant European painting tradition, but also ignored and to an extent rejected by
the west for being a mimicry of traditional masterpieces and lacking the ingenuity of
true modernist art.71

68
Sue Prichard, “Collecting the Contemporary: ‘Love Will Decide What Is Kept and Science
Will Decide How It Is Kept,’” in The Textile Reader, ed. Jessica Hemmings (London, New
York: Berg, 2012), 79.
69
Elizabeth Harney, “The Ecole de Dakar: Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile,” African Arts
35, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 15.
70
Harney, 18.
71
Harney, 16.
62
Although European Modernism in the arts was developed from a mimicry of non-
Western "traditions" and masterpieces through artists' exposure to non-Western art
forms, even if this was not yet widely acknowledged at the time, the West held non-
Western artists to a different set of criteria in the evaluation of the modern arts.
Europe's fascination with "primitivist" arts clouded the reception of both objects and
new practices that exhibited modernity in multiple forms. In terms of curatorial
practice, however, this becomes problematic as information about the textiles as well
as contemporary artistic practices that appropriate them serve to unravel the West's
notions of “traditionality” and expose its biases. Although progress towards inclusion
concerning African textiles is made, these Western ideas about traditionality continue
to permeate the reception of contemporary African art in the West.

Exhibiting the Contemporary, Seeking Authenticity: Textiles and art in

curatorial practice

By the end of the 1980s, the use of the word "traditional" shifted towards a
redefinition of "authenticity" as it related to the presence of the "traditional" within
contemporary African visual culture. With regards to the textile, this meant the artistic
appropriation of patterns and processes as a means of signifying a connection to
African culture. From a curatorial standpoint, artworks that fell into this category
could provide a lens through which to view African textiles in their contemporaneity,
or to understand them from a contemporary context. As such artistic appropriation
continued and exhibitions that featured them abounded in the 2000s, the curatorial
objective shifted to one in which the textile served as a lens on the art and the artist.
Predisposed to Western misconceptions about African textiles, however, these
exhibitions developed their own issues even as their curators turned to textiles as
refuge from the complicated and controversial terrain of identity politics within the
field of contemporary African art.

In 1989, when John Picton and John Mack were publishing the second edition of
African Textiles, the authors were acutely aware of the mistakes made in the first
edition, and that a number of shifts had taken place within the discipline that needed
to be addressed. Picton recalls removing the word ‘traditional’ from the title of Mack’s
essay on Madagascar. He explains, “At best it was redundant: it served no useful
purpose and signified nothing that was not already obvious. At worst, it was

63
misleading, supposing an essentially ‘authentic’ African practice…Traditionality was,
indeed, exposed as a fiction denoting an invented and perhaps largely spurious
authenticity.”72 By the third edition of Picton and Mack’s "African Textiles" the
authors' approach towards "traditional" textiles shifted again. The book was
published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London
titled, "The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition and Lurex" and it marked
the first time the curators included contemporary art as well as factory-made prints
and other “non-traditional” textiles, ushering in a new format for exhibiting
contemporary African art and textiles.

The exhibition opened with an appliqué produced in Cairo with factory-made fabrics
and closed with an installation by Yinka Shonibare. According to Picton, sandwiching
the rest of the exhibition between these two unlikely inclusions gave “an indication of
the many ways in which textiles in Africa have been made and used and how they
have changed and developed through the course of this century” and emphasized
the diversity of the selection and the importance of textiles in the visual arts of
Africa.73 In this context, Shonibare’s work was a highly appropriate inclusion. Rooted
in the cross-cultural history of the Dutch wax print, Shonibare’s installation was
instrumental to Picton and Mack’s intention in their third publication to uncover a
narrative about artists and patrons involved with the textile as a medium of art in the
modern world (rather than a once pristine tradition) that undermined European
hegemony.74 The work was also useful towards the aim of the Barbican exhibition to
broaden the perspective on African textiles by scratching at the surface of textile
histories, revealing hybrid origins and a reliance on complex webs of trade that
exposed the fiction of a textile's authenticity. However, as Shonibare's work was
exhibited with greater frequency in the years that followed, the curatorial objective of
showing his textile-based installations and sculptural pieces appears to have
changed. As the work of African and Diaspora artists like him garnered more
attention in the 1990s, showcased by a number of large-scale exhibitions beginning
with the now infamous Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in

72
Picton, Becker, and Barbican Art Gallery, The Art of African Textiles, 11. See also: John
Picton and John Mack, African Textiles (London: Published for the Trustees of the British
Museum by British Museum Publications, 1989), 8.
73
Picton, Becker, and Barbican Art Gallery, The Art of African Textiles, 6.
74
Ibid, 12.
64
1989, new relationships between modernity and tradition were being mediated
through engagements with personal and cultural identity.75 Positioned as the locus of
a growing body of work from artists working and exhibiting in New York, London and
Paris, African identity was not just the subject of many artists’ work, but oftentimes
their ticket to the art world establishment, a play in what Olu Oguibe has termed “the
culture game,” whereby artists embrace their non-Western identity (even those who
were born and raised in the West) by making their work look “ethnic” to satisfy the art
establishment’s expectations.76

Shonibare knowingly employed an "ethnic looking" fabric in his work as a symbol of

African identity, at once playing into expectations of how his work should look and
subverting those same prescriptions. It was one of these expectations that initially
motivated Shonibare to use the textile when his tutor in a London college suggested
that he make work that was ‘authentically African’ instead of pursuing his project on
the theme of perestroika.77 Although he elected the Dutch wax print to question and
expose the fallacy of an authenticity of “Africanness,” posing a critique of the
Western art audience, the work nevertheless grew immensely popular and may have
even solidified the associations between the fabric and Africa. After a few group
shows and a solo in London galleries between 1988 and 1989 while he was enrolled
at Byam Shaw School of Art and afterwards at Goldsmiths College, Shonibare
showed outside the UK in a group show called "Interrogating Identity" that travelled
around to several major U.S. institutions. This exhibition, which "considered the
notion of what we would now call the African diaspora through an interrogation of the
designation "black" in the United States, England, and Canada," effectively
introduced Shonibare's work to the mainstream U.S. art world, but within the
paradigm of African identity.78 Within the context of these exhibitions concerned with

75
This point is made in the introduction by the editors Oguibe and Enwezor, but is
elaborated in a number of the essays in the book. See: Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor,
Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (London: Institute of
International Visual Arts (InIVA), 1999), 10.
76
See: “Double Dutch and the Culture Game” in Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 33-44.
77
Rachel Kent, ed., “Setting the Stage: Yinka Shonibare MBE in Conversation with Anthony
Downey,” in Yinka Shonibare MBE (Munich; Berlin; London; New York: Prestel Verlag,
2008), 39.
78
Kellie Jones and Amiri Baraka, eds., EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 31.
65
identity is where a shift occurred--the artist's work was no longer serving as a lens on
the textile, instead, the textile was providing a lens onto the artist and his identity. In
Shonibare's case, the lens revealed that as a society we continue to suffer from a
great deal of unease when it comes to comprehending the legitimacy or authenticity
of a product, and by extension a person, with multi-cultural or hybrid origins. That
unease was evident in the controversial titling of exhibitions of non-Western artists,
but also with the discomfort several artists voiced over the use of the term "African"
when it was applied to their work or their identity. 79

Several transitions took place within curatorial practice from encyclopedic exhibitions
of 'African Textiles' and blockbuster shows of contemporary African art to the more
focused theme of textiles in art. To fully understand from where this trend emerged
and why it is unique, it is worth reviewing some of the shows that preceded and
informed it. The Barbican show was significant for its inclusion of pieces that
presented a challenge to the persistence of “traditionality” in the context of African
textiles and put forth visual arts as a part of the evolution of the contemporary textile.
However, it was not the first exhibition to show work that demonstrated the overlap
between textiles and art. Several earlier exhibitions, which were mounted during the
1960s and 70s alongside the large-scale exhibitions such as Sieber's, focused
exclusively on textile-based contemporary arts such as the experimental batik works
coming out of Oshogbo, Nigeria in the 1970s, and a New York exhibition of the
Senegalese tapestries in 1978. These sometimes tended to be smaller-scale shows
in private galleries and universities. They included “Moderne Kunst aus Oshogbo" at
the Neue Münchner Galerie, in Munich, Germany in 1965; "Contemporary Art of
Oshogbo, Nigeria" at the Contemporary Arts Gallery, New York University in May
1971; "Contemporary Nigerian Graphics and Textiles" at the National Center of Afro-
American Artists, Boston, Massachusetts in 1973; "Aladire and Oshogbo Graphics,"
at the African Heritage Center Gallery, Washington, DC, November 1973;
"Contemporary Nigerian Fabrics and Prints” at the Ife-Ife Black Humanitarian Center,

79
For example, Sokari Douglas Camp explains "I see myself as an artist. Being an African
artist or being a Western artist has got nothing to do with it....I can't talk about the whole of
Africa." Similar sentiments are echoed by Olu Oguibe, Kebedech Tekleab, and Aimé Mpane,
among others. See: Christine Mullen Kreamer, “Framing Practices: Artists’ Voices and the
Power of Self-Representation,” in African Art, Interviews, Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at
Work, ed. Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2013), 154–57.
66
Philadelphia USA in Jan 1974; and "Nigerian Batiks" at Tribal Arts Gallery Two, New
York in March 1974, among others.

Curiously, as the Barbican-type exhibition proliferated in the decade to follow the

1995 show, batik works from Oshogbo and tapestries from Thiès were absent. Nor
were the indigo-textile inspired paintings and prints by Bruce Onobrakpeya and
others emerging from the Zaria school included. Apart from Nike (Davies) Okundaye,
whose textiles or adire-inspired paintings were sometimes included in later shows,
the works emerging from Oshogbo that explored the resist technique as an
expressive form akin to painting without straying from the fabric medium were
excluded, even though they, like the tapestries from Senegal, were important
precursors to textile-inspired work of the 1990s and early 2000s.

These exclusions are significant for a number of reasons. By creating separate

models for the exhibition of textiles, textiles-as-art, and textiles-in-art, art institutions
effectively demarcated these intimately related practices by their differences. The
result is that the exhibitions of Shonibare and his contemporaries--which are
distinguished from the batik and tapestry exhibitions and the exclusively textile
exhibitions by the key factor of appropriation--imply that these artists are inventors of
a new artistic genre. The reality is that not only were similar works being created
decades earlier by West African artists, but that many textiles are works of art in and
of themselves, oftentimes produced through appropriative processes, and made by
master weavers and dyers who mark the work with a signature.

The inclusion of textiles by renowned weavers, designers, and dyers in an exhibition

helps blur the lines between a textile and a work of art. This was evident in the
holistic and open approach to textiles in Doran Ross's ‘Wrapped in Pride,’ an
exhibition of Ghanaian kente and African American identity indomitable in breadth
and depth of material. Presented in 1998 by the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural
History Textile Series, the exhibition featured the kente cloths of master weaver
Samuel Cophie, eliminating the division between old or ancient textiles and
contemporary art. Cophie, born in 1939, has mastery of complex classical patterns,

67
but also invents his own and must do his best to protect those patterns as his own
intellectual property, as many weavers and designers face threats of plagiarism.80

Ross also included several artists who used kente in their work, including several
hand-woven pieces that brought together elements of kente, the American flag, and
photography by African American artist Sonya Clark, and paintings by John Biggers,
Frank E. Smith and James Phillips whose surface patterning suggested the warp
and weft of kente strip-weave. The show provided hundreds of examples that
illustrated both kente as a contemporary art form in its own right, as well as the
methods and intentions of kente’s appropriation across art, fashion, popular and
material culture, specifically as it related to African American culture. Among these
objects were examples of kente-print, a factory produced cloth with the image of
kente as its pattern, and many items produced from it. This inclusive approach to
curating was, however, short-lived.

As the curatorial trend to place textiles side by side with art became increasingly
popular in the 21st century, a formulaic curatorial procedure emerged whereby artists
that drew upon the patterns, materials and histories of cloth in their work were
exhibited alongside the same textiles that appear to have influenced their practice,
particularly when those textiles were of the handmade “traditional” type rather than
factory-made. Shonibare was joined by a limited number of other artists whose work
appropriated or made reference to textiles, and was labeled as African. The artists
in this niche included, El Anatsui, Sokari Douglas Camp, Donald Odita, Viyé Diba,
Abdoulaye Konaté, Grace Ndiritu, Atta Kwami, Rikki Wemega-Kwawu, Brother
Owosu-Ankomah, Nike (Davies) Okundaye, Rachid Koraïchi and Achamyeleh
Debela among others. Their works were shown in ‘The Essential Art of African
Textiles: Design Without End’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in (September 30,
2008 – March 22, 2009); “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art” at the
Grey Art Gallery, New York University (September 16 – December 6, 2008); “Africa
Interweave: Textile Diasporas” at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of
Florida, Gainesville (February 8 – May 8, 2011); “Hollandaise: a journey into an

80
For an in-depth study of intellectual property issues facing kente weavers see: Boatema
Boateng, The Copyright Thing Doesn’t Work Here : Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual
Property in Ghana, First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
68
iconic fabric” at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA) in the
Netherlands (November 3, 2012 - January 5, 2013) and at Raw Material Company
in Dakar, Senegal (April 10 – June 1, 2013); and the recent “Social Fabric: African
Textiles Today,” a 2015-2016 touring exhibition by the British Museum. With little
variation, these exhibitions presented contemporary works of art in tandem with the
textiles that presented a temporal distinction between “old” textiles and “new” art
accompanied by an underlying assumption that something was to be gained by
observing these artworks in the vicinity of textiles, a seemingly harmless approach to
contemporary African art, which was at the emergence of the 21st century a field
fraught with complexity and difficulty.

In some cases, like with Picton's and Ross's previous shows, curators began to
recognize the importance of factory-produced fabrics in the history of global trade
networks, and the impact of the fabrics on visual and material culture. The
introduction for "Africa Interweave: Textile Diasporas," for example, indicates that the
“intersecting trajectories and the forces that have propelled the ceaseless flow of
textiles on the African continent and beyond its boundaries” are the focus of the
exhibition.81 Such efforts to unearth previously obscured histories of trade have
revealed West African merchants and producers as powerful actors in the global
network of trade. The inclusion of “non-traditional” textiles along with their cross-
cultural histories also helps curators to break free of the associations of African
textiles with “traditional” or hand-made practices by exposing the connections
between West African cloth and Indian woodblock prints, North African looms and
West African strip-weaving, or Japanese indigos and European chintz to name just a
few examples of evidence of early global exchange of visual culture via cloth.
However, these exhibitions and their catalogues have at times also reproduced
several problematic tropes of contemporary African art, and struggled to break free
from the difficulties of curating African textiles.

Exhibitions of textiles and art-appropriating-textiles often continue to display

preferences for West African strip-cloth, which is perhaps best illustrated by the
success of Ghanaian-born sculptor El Anatsui. Anatsui had a long and fruitful career
as an artist in Nigeria before he became internationally renowned following his solo

81
Cooksey, Africa Interweave: Textile Diasporas, 13.
69
show in 1995 at October Gallery in London that launched his career in the UK and
beyond. A few years later, a fortuitous discovery in 1998 of a bag full of discarded
bottle caps lead to Anatsui’s first "metal tapestry" and a vast series of works in the
same material that have earned him the art world’s highest accolades. Although
Anatsui had been working for decades with found and discarded objects from milk
tins to shards of wooden vessels or clay pots it wasn't until he began working with
the bottle caps that the international art world took notice. Between 2003 and 2008 a
major solo show called Gawu featuring his bottle cap tapestries toured the UK and
six locations in the US, solidifying Anatsui’s place in the uppermost echelons of the
art world. The "tapestries" exhibited in Gawu were accompanied by a number of
other works that were also composed of found and discarded materials such as
Crumbling Wall (2000), Wastepaper Bag (2003), and Peak Project (1999). Each of
these works, which use the golden lids of condensed milk tins (Peak Project),
discarded printing plates, or rusted steel sheets once used to grate cassava, address
both the lack of recycling in African nations and the enormity of human consumption
and waste. What eventually came to be known as metal tapestries and associated
with textiles such as kente were also providing a commentary on consumption. This
commentary is often lost, however, amid the predominant interpretive framework of
the textile. Crumbling Wall, Wastepaper bag and Peak Project also serve as
examples of Anatsui's artistic process of binding the pieces together with copper
wire, which achieves two transformative feats: He turns small, unrecyclable pieces of
detritus into monumental scale objects, and he creates a malleable, draping,
softness out of metal.

Both of these transformations are critical to the development of a dominant leitmotif

of cloth, which emerges as a result of the experimentation with bringing these
objects together as a whole. But as interest in his work exploded, his bottle cap-
based works became practically synonymous with textiles, specifically Ghanaian
kente, all but obliterating the clear and significant relationship to his previous work.
Unlike Shonibare, who employed the Dutch-made textile deliberately as a means of
subversion and a challenge to the notion of authenticity as it is applied to African
identity, for Anatsui, the connections to the textile in his work happened somewhat
accidentally. Despite the fact the artist had long since left Ghana, and made no initial
connection between the woven fabric of his homeland and his works, the

70
interpretation seemed inescapable as scholars repeatedly made the association
between his work, his Ghanaian roots, and Ghana’s textile production. "I have
discovered only much later . . . that cloth has been a recurring theme or leitmotif, and
it is featured in so many dimensions."82

The exhibitions at the Metropolitan, the Grey Gallery, and the Samuel P. Harn
Museum all displayed "metal tapestry" works by Anatsui and kente cloth. This
suggests not just the large role that curatorial practice has played in the
interpretation of Anatsui's work as relating to kente, but it also highlights a
discrepancy within the comparative framework of these exhibitions. Whereas
Anatsui's "tapestries" are casually analogized with kente, Shonibare’s work is not
shown alongside factory printed textiles. Although the new information about factory
prints may have been illuminating for audiences at Yinka Shonibare’s early shows,
the factory cloth is not used in the same way that the history and material object of
kente is used as an analytical tool for viewing an Anatsui. As with the earlier
exhibitions of textiles, preferential treatment of handmade “traditional” textiles over
factory produced or “modern” ones is evident. Shonibare’s use of the physical Vlisco
cloth sets his practice apart from those of his contemporaries that may only allude to
the textile, but his inclusion in nearly every exhibition having anything to do with
textiles raises some questions. One might ask, for example, whether Shonibare’s
work would have benefitted from a side-by-side exhibition of his installations with an
early 19th century Dutch Wax print. Such an inclusion would be contemporaneous
with many hand-woven kente cloths that fall within the “traditional” category, and
serve the same function to guide the viewer to discourses on Euro-African trade and
colonialism. The fact that this was not something done by the curators points to an
inconsistency in their model whereby some artists’ works are deemed to benefit from
the comparison to the textile, and others stand on their own. It not only points to a
continuing preference for kente and other West African hand-woven practices, but it
also subtly reinforces a paradigm of old textile--new art by continuing to subordinate
factory produced and imported fabrics. Rather than using an antique Dutch wax print
to illustrate that factory prints were contemporary with and in some cases even
preceded handmade African textiles, many of these exhibitions perpetuated the

82
"El Anatsui: Gawu" https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/gawu/index.html (Accessed February 1,
2017).
71
issues surrounding the reception of African textiles, even extending those
misperceptions to African art.

In the closing essay of the catalogue for the “Poetics of Cloth” exhibition, curator
Lynn Gumpert acknowledges some of the challenges she and her colleagues faced
in organizing the exhibition. The essay opens with an excerpt from David Elliott’s
contribution to the catalogue of Africa Remix that reads, “Africa has long been a
curator’s graveyard. Big, ‘dangerous,’ impossible to pin down, this vast continent has
dwarfed any attempt to contain it and many exhibitions of contemporary African art
have ended up reinforcing those stereotypes of backwardness, exoticism or
dislocation that their curators have struggled to combat.”83 Wary of committing the
same mistakes as those exhibitions that preceded hers, Gumpert lays bare her
concerns that range from terminology to issues of canonization and authenticity.
Several of these issues were brought to her before the installation of the show by
one of the featured artists, Rikki Wemega-Kwawu, who voiced his concern over the
potential sidelining of the contemporary artists by the parallel display of their work
with “traditional” African textiles.84

Wemega-Kwawu’s unease in sharing the spotlight with textiles stems from numerous
precedents both in exhibitions and literature in which African cloth is often
glamorized by institutional language and treatment; described as ‘magnificent,’
‘poetic,’ ‘essential’ or ‘woven beauty,’ and associated with ‘majesty,’ ‘patterns of life,’
or ‘pride.’ Glamorizing words and phrases are typically reserved for hand-woven,
painted or dyed textiles such as kente, adinkra, adire, or aso-oke. However, even the
quotidian factory-produced fabrics such as kente-print, khanga and ankara long
excluded from textile exhibitions and publications, are also occasionally described as
‘dazzling’ or ‘striking’ in their vast array of patterns and bold colors, particularly as
they are first found piled high in folded stacks in the open-air markets of Lagos,
Accra, Nairobi, and so on. Yet, flattery does not inform or contribute to the work in
any meaningful way. Rather, flattery can be counterproductive by diverting attention
away from meaningful analysis or historical contextualization. The language utilized
in the scholarship of African textiles can read much like an atonement reminiscent of

83
Lynn Gumpert, ed., The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art (New York, NY:
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2008), 85.
84
Ibid.
72
Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro’s critique of institutional treatment of Latin American art that
presents it in a patronizing and generalized manner “as an enchanting world of
timeless splendor and magnificence or as a historical burden to be piously
addressed.”85

Wemega-Kwawu’s apprehensions towards an exhibition in which contemporary art is

shown side by side with textiles from Africa’s past are grounded in real art world
examples.86 However, whereas he worried about the overshadowing of art in a New
York gallery by the grandeur of African textiles, the juxtaposition also presents the
risk of pigeonholing the artwork such that it cannot be viewed or read beyond the
relationship with the textile and its Africanity. Just a couple weeks after the
September 16, 2008 opening of the “Poetics” exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art opened “The Essential Art of African Textiles” that
featured five of the same artists as Gumpert’s exhibition. "The Essential Art...”
exhibition was mounted in the Africa gallery of the Metropolitan Museum. Works by
Anatsui, Sokari Douglas Camp, and Atta Kwami were placed amongst the textiles,
masks, and ancient artifacts of the entire African continent rather than in the
museum’s contemporary galleries or in a special exhibit gallery. In this case, the
presence of the textile and other artifacts, along with the location of the exhibition
undermined the contemporaneity of the artists’ practices.

In other cases, it is the modernity or contemporaneity of the textiles at stake,

particularly through the division of works into contrasting categories of “old” and
“new,” or “traditional” and “modern,” even in instances where the terms do not
accurately apply. The subtitle for Gumpert’s show, “African Textiles / Recent Art,” for
example, implies the latter is more contemporary than the former when in reality
several of the textiles exhibited were also late 20th century productions, post-dating
some of the “recent art.” In the acknowledgements section of the catalogue for "The
Essential Art...” joint curators Alisa LaGamma and Christine Giuntini remark, “this

85
Gumpert, 93.
86
An example is the Art of the Americas wing of the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston, which
opened in 2010. The wing ascends chronologically through four floors, with Pre-Columbian
objects on the basement floor and works of Abstract Expressionism on the top floor.
However, works of contemporary art by Native American artists are located in the basement,
presumably because the contemporary works are best understood in the context of the
antique Native American pieces. This curatorial choice deprives the contemporary artists of
their contemporaneity, and assumes that the works cannot be appreciated on their own.
73
project is unusual in its juxtaposition of traditional textiles with works by
contemporary artists.”87 Here, the terms traditional and contemporary are used to
contrast textiles and art, thereby depriving textiles of modernity in order to highlight
the contemporaneity of the artwork.

Although there was sufficient research available by the time of these exhibitions to
dispel spurious notions of a traditional or authentic African textile, more often than
not, this body of research was not used as a resource by the curators of these
important textile exhibitions. Instead, catalogues frequently referenced scholarship
written when textile research was a relatively new, often unsophisticated field, and
tended to focus on technique, materials, and formal qualities, which resulted in a
portrayal of domestic, “tradition-bound” industries. This restrictive view permeated
the Metropolitan’s catalogue, even though the exhibition was rife with textiles
displaying silk threads, synthetic dyes, and imported fabrics that are evidence of
West Africa’s active involvement in trans-Saharan and oceanic trade, and suggestive
of numerous modernizations to textile production. Among these modern cloths, the
exhibition included an intricately patterned adire eleko cloth titled Olokun, an early
20th century product of Yorubaland’s indigo dyeing industry with a distinct pattern
indicative of the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural cosmopolitan city of Lagos where it
was likely made.88 However, the information provided in the catalogue for the Olokun
and a number of other textile pieces (including a men’s robe and wrapper from
Nigeria) are sourced from dated texts that were published in the 1970s and 80s.
None of the more recently published texts such as Kriger (2006), Picton (1995) or
Byfield (1997; 2002) that shed light on the specific modernity of 20th century indigo
dyeing in Nigeria were used as resources by the curators. Kriger’s text, in particular,
offers an in-depth formal and historical analysis of the Olokun cloth that explains why
the pattern is representative of a cross-cultural and cosmopolitan port city of Lagos.
Although the intention of the Metropolitan’s exhibition was to draw attention to how
some “fundamental aesthetic qualities of West Africa’s textile genres have proved

87
Alisa LaGamma, Christine Giuntini, and Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York N.Y.), The
Essential Art of African Textiles: Design without End (New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2008), 6.
88
Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History, The African Archaeology Series (Lanham,
MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), 155.
74
resonant for contemporary artists,” these aesthetic qualities have not been analyzed
or researched in depth by the curators.89

The inattention to a textile’s modernity not only undermines the viewer’s

understanding of the textile, but it compromises the viewing of the artwork to which it
is being compared. Even where a misunderstanding of the textile is not an issue, the
mere presence of the textile may actually serve to inhibit further interpretations of the
work by constructing a narrow lens through which the viewer conceives of the
artwork. A 2015 solo show in Berlin of Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté illustrates how
the mere presence of a textile places limitations on the interpretation of the
contemporary art work. The exhibition at Blain Southern gallery featured a number of
Konaté’s monumental fabric works including Gris-Gris blanc, an abstracted homage
to the hunter’s tunic of the Bamana people. The piece, constructed entirely from
unbleached cotton is adorned with elongated sacks that recall the amulets that
typically adorn the tunic and serve apotropaic purposes for the hunter. 90 The
monotone off-white color is textured by shadows drawn down from the attachments,
flecking the surface with lights and darks. The connection to the tunic is suggested
by the "T" shape of the canvas, but the visual and tactile effects evoke the aesthetics
of minimalism, abstract expressionism, and Arte Povera's anti-materialism. However,
directly beside the piece was a mannequin dressed in the Bamana hunting garment,
an addition that made any symbolic connections to Konaté’s work so obvious that
any further contemplations of the work itself might have been aborted (figure 1.2).91

The juxtaposition of El Anatsui’s metal tapestries with kente can have the same
halting effect, much to the detriment of Anatsui’s work. Although Anatsui’s work is
endlessly compared to the kente cloth, the similarities of his metal tapestries to the
textile only arose much later, according to the artist, who sees the repurposed bottle
cap material as integral to the form and meaning of the works, not as a means of
visually evoking kente.92 One could argue that his upbringing in a family of kente

89
LaGamma, Giuntini, and Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York N.Y.), The Essential Art
of African Textiles: Design without End, 9.
90
Gumpert, The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art, 60.
91
It is unclear whether this was the artist’s wish or a curatorial choice. The exhibition titled,
‘Useful Dreams’ was held at Blain Southern from 7 February – 18 April 2015.
92
“Playing with Chance: Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos ‘X-Rays’ El Anatsui at 70,”
May 4, 2014, http://artdaily.com/news/69510/Playing-with-Chance--Centre-for-
Contemporary-Art-in-Lagos--X-rays--El-Anatsui-at-70#..
75
weavers subconsciously influenced his aesthetics, but by the 1990s at the time when
he first turned bottle caps into art he had already been living and working in Nsukka,
Nigeria for about twenty years. The same aesthetic similarities that have been made
between his work and kente could be drawn to the strip-woven aso-oke cloths
produced in Nigeria, many of which are woven in Lurex threads that create a metallic
sheen similar to Anatsui’s bottle cap tapestries (figure 1.3). While the aesthetic
relationship of the works to textiles is clear, particularly in the way they are capable
of being draped and folded, or act like cloth, to analyze Anatsui’s work exclusively in
terms of its aesthetic and symbolic relationship to kente provides only a part of the
potential interpretive framework. The bottle caps are one key to interpreting the work
because they come from liquor bottles imported from Europe. These products
represent trade between West Africans and the Europeans that link the works to the
wider concepts of slavery and colonialism embedded in the symbolism of the cap
and the brand names that many of them still bear.

Despite Anatsui’s shift towards a monochromatic palette with the intention of

avoiding the red-gold-green and black color scheme pre-existing in the bottle caps
that are also common to kente, the temptation to textile-ize Anatsui’s work persists.93
In 2010, Roberta Smith of the New York Times remarked “…the works evoke lace
but also chain mail; quilts but also animal hides; garments but also mosaic, not to
mention the rich ceremonial cloths of numerous cultures.”94 There are indeed direct
references to cloth in Anatsui’s formal language, structure and even the titles of
some of these works such as Old Man’s Cloth (2003). Much of the literature that
accompanies his shows present to the public interesting but limited interpretations of
historical narratives concerning trade, slavery and colonialism, but even these are
rooted in the past and provide only the token understanding evoked by the side-by-
side placement of Anatsui’s work with a 19th century kente cloth, through which a
viewer could draw the same connections.

Reading Anatsui’s work through the kente cloth allows for an engagement with
history via metaphors of weaving, and more importantly, enters the viewer into a
discourse on memory tied to the ceremonial functions of kente, the practice of

93
“Playing with Chance: Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos ‘X-Rays’ El Anatsui at 70.”
94
Roberta Smith, “Swagger and Sideburns: Bad Boys in Galleries,” The New York Times,
February 11, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/arts/design/12boys.html.
76
naming and re-naming cloths that alter meaning, and the roles kente played in the
making of national and pan-African identity. These interpretations are satisfying and
fairly easy to make, which lend to their temptation and their persistence. Yet to a
degree they are also limited by the Western conceptions of kente and African identity
and history.

Leaving kente behind in considering Anatsui’s work opens the work up to new,
expanded interpretations of the material and viewing experiences. For one, the
textile interpretation ignores the early works of the artist in wood and clay that were
formative phases leading up to the development of working with the found materials.
Much of this early work is unknown to Western audiences. By looking at this work
produced in the 1970s and 80s some continuities become apparent. Prior to working
with the bottle caps, Anatsui was already experimenting with assembling physical
fragments into freshly constructed wholes. An interest in ideograms early in his
career, especially the linguistic traditions of the Akan people that appear in various
forms such as adinkra fabric, evolved into a broader questioning of the relationship
of writing to history and memory. Like fragments of material, words and symbols
could also be reassembled anew. The choice of Akan written language was a clear
prioritizing of an African language over all others, and suggested an undercutting of
the hegemonic power of Latin script in the writing of history to date.95 The use of
Akan symbols also presented an alternative mode of working visually that broke
away from his Western training and adopted the traditions that were legibly
Ghanaian, and engaged local memories and histories.

The Broken Pots series begun in 1978 would continue the thematic trajectory of
memory and history Anatsui entered with the ideograms. As the series title suggests,
it was a collection of vessel-shaped objects reassembled from ceramic shards. The
reassembling left large holes and cracks between the pieces, suggesting a fragile
state susceptible to shattering again. Yet the shards themselves, having survived the
long passage of time, have proven resistant. The vessel can be continuously re-
made in ever-changing compositions; history, likewise can be shattered, its pieces

95
Anatsui also worked with Igbo ideograms in Nigeria. Olu Oguibe notes “Unlike what today
remains of the Latin script, rid as it is of both history and symbolism, the Akan ideogram
remains a mnemonic sign, a repository of memory and myth—myth as the codification of
both history and norm.” Oguibe, The Culture Game, 99.
77
continuously re-erected into new narratives. These same notions can be applied to
Anatsui's later "metal tapestries," formed of thousands of metal fragments, or equally
to a textile whose pattern is merely a methodical intertwining of threads that could be
unraveled and rewoven into infinite new compositions.

Materially and aesthetically speaking, Anatsui’s "metal tapestry" work belongs

among the growing ranks of artists such as Christo and Jeanne Claude, Tara
Donovan and Thomas Hirschhorn who explore the monumental capacity of the
quotidian object through its transformation via artistic intervention. Removed from the
context of textiles or African art, Anatsui’s glittering metal-works draw the audience in
with their visual allure, inspiring sensations of rapture, and leaving collectors and
institutions scrambling for a cut of the artist’s cloth.96 An encounter with Anatsui’s
piece at the Venice Biennale in 2007 led Gary Tinterow, curator of Modern art at the
Metropolitan, to acquire a second piece from Anatsui in 2008 for the museum’s
permanent collection. The first, Between Earth and Heaven, was featured in the
textile exhibition “The Essential Art…” and belonged to the Department of the Arts of
Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, where it was displayed. The placement of
Anatsui's work in one of the galleries of the Africa department allowed for the piece
to be considered “in the context of the rich regional and historical textile traditions it
evokes” according to then director Philippe de Montebello.97 The second acquisition
under Tinterow became part of the permanent collection of modern and
contemporary art “thus emphasizing on the international stage his standing as one of
Africa’s leading artists.”98 The two acquisitions, each one made of the same material
by the same man, but occupying space in different departments and fulfilling different
objectives for the museum signals a persistent dilemma for the African artist who
vacillates between being “African” or being “contemporary” and is rarely permitted to
be both at once.

96
Kwame Anthony Appiah recalls seeing an Anatsui metal tapestry as “one of the great
artistic epiphanies of my life” leaving him “enraptured”. See: Alexi Worth, “El Anatsui,” T
Magazine, February 19, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/style/tmagazine/22nigeria.html?_r=0.
97
Philippe de Montebello in Director’s Foreword, in: Gumpert, The Poetics of Cloth: African
Textiles / Recent Art, 6.
98
Ibid.
78
The interpretation of Anatsui's work as a kente cloth re-imagined is neither incorrect
nor far-fetched, but it represents an essentialized limit grounded in Western ideas of
Africanity. Harking back to Shonibare's subversion of authenticity on Western terms,
the inclusion of Anatsui's work in nearly every exhibition that combined African
textiles and African art illustrates how the interpretation was framed and popularized
as another facile construal: the meaning of the artwork is derived from an ethnic,
African "tradition." The Ghanaian painter, Atta Kwami, who was also included in
several of these exhibitions, has claimed, “all too often, opinion-makers from the
West see their own art in innovative terms, while African art is inauthentic unless it
can be seen to be rooted in tradition.” He laments the constant comparison of his
abstract, brightly colored canvases to kente cloth and to European and American
painters that have come before him insisting that to view his work exclusively in
terms of kente would be to stereotype the work.99 Kwami’s statement reveals a
troubling double standard for artists whose work is associated with textiles. Unlike
the woven cloths in Roy Sieber’s MoMA exhibition, selected for their resonance with
contemporary American aesthetics but credited with a degree of originality,
contemporary artists who either come from or are associated with Africa must both
appeal to the Western aesthetic sensibilities by satisfying Western ideas of what
African art looks like, and cite their heritage as the source of their artistic ingenuity.

These issues are encapsulated by the question posed by N’Goné Fall: “While
looking at the work of Matthew Barney or Olafur Eliasson people will never refer to
their supposed Celtic or Roman origins. But the same people will be tempted to
emphasise the ‘Africanity’ of Pascale Marthine Tayou or El Anatsui. Are African
artists condemned to carry their specific antique heritage and expected to perpetuate
obsolete traditions?”100 Fall’s question levels with the duplicitous nature of Western
practices of inclusion, while Shonibare’s subversive display of his ‘Africanness’
exposes the art world’s double standard for black artists working in the West. The
double standards of acceptance, the misinterpretations by Western audiences, and

99
Sharon Obuobi and Atta Kwami, In Studio with Atta Kwami, January 5, 2017,
http://www.sharonobuobi.com/blog/in-studio-with-atta-kwami.; Spring, African Textiles
Today, 56.
100
N’Goné Fall, “The Repositioning of Contemporary Art from Africa on the Map,” CCA
Lagos Newsletter, April 2012.
79
the baggage that comes with the label of “African” for artists has brought some to
shun it altogether.

The exhibitions referenced above have played a role in creating and perpetuating
these conditions for contemporary artists. Given the deficiency of research on
African textiles available to or used by the curators, the premise of the exhibitions
was flawed by inaccuracies and euro-centricities that included but were not limited to
an overemphasis on ‘traditionality’ and the promotion of some types of textiles over
others, which were then implicated in the selection and reception of the
contemporary artists included in the later exhibitions. With a few exceptions, the
combination of textiles and contemporary art in these shows tended towards a
simplistic analytical framework that looked to the textile for the source of the
artwork’s aesthetic and conceptual substance, tying the artist’s identity to his or her
African heritage. Such a curatorial procedure had the effect of making the textile and
the meaning of the artwork inextricable, often to the detriment of both pieces. The
artworks could not be fully conceived as contemporary productions, nor were their
formal or symbolic meanings outside of the textile easily discernible within the textile-
bound framework of the exhibition, and the textiles were used as symbols of a
“traditional” culture. Ironically, while these exhibitions seemed preoccupied with
finding similarities between artworks and textiles, they may have missed the most
significant similarity of all: both visual artists and textile designers and producers
employ a strategy of appropriation in their practices.

Appropriation as Artistic Procedure

Artistic appropriation, the procedure of taking and reworking existing images,

designs, materials or forms for one’s own purposes or into a local visual vernacular,
is fundamental to textile production. Through acts of appropriation that translate the
visual environment into woven, printed, embroidered and quilted forms, a textile
pattern is made. Viewed in this light, the artworks and textiles presented in the
exhibitions listed in the last section are first and foremost united by their similarity of
process instead of material. Rather than the pejorative associations with copying or
stealing that often accompanies discussions of artistic appropriation, the processes
whereby textiles have been invented, reworked, and popularized exhibit a
commitment to absorbing the visual and material world, translating it into pattern,

80
and being made marketable in the local or global textile trade. There are several
ways in which modernist and contemporary art borrows from the methods of textile
design, commonalities that are missing from the both the literature of textile-based
art and their exhibitions. In the act of appropriating the patterns or material of
textiles, the artist appropriates the textile producer’s means of synthesizing diverse
visual sources into the pictorial plane, as well as the textile's capacity to speak
through symbols, colors, and inscriptions. This serves to level the field by looking at
artists and textile producers as equal agents in the making of visual culture, rather
than the incompatible and hierarchical positions of artist and craftsperson.

Several examples from West Africa illustrate the various means by which foreign
imagery or material has been appropriated and acculturated into a local vernacular
and function through the textile.101 In Nigeria, for instance, the injiri cloth has been
imported from India since the mid to late 19th century. Composed of gingham, a
lightweight, checked cotton cloth, injiri has been adopted into dress and ceremonial
functions by the Kalabari people on the Niger Delta, who do not produce textiles of
their own. The fabric is altered by cutting and pulling out threads in order to produce
geometric designs that serve social identification and symbolic ends, thereby
becoming an integral element of Kalabari visual, sartorial and material culture.102 In a
similar practice of alteration, 19th century Asante weavers unraveled textiles
purchased from Danish merchants to re-use the magenta silk yarns in their own
work.103 In the early 20th century, the Yoruba appropriated the portrait busts of King
George V and Queen Mary from colonial paraphernalia to produce an indigo-dyed
adire cloth called adire oloba that may have been inspired by British chintz or early
factory-made portrait cloths produced in the UK for the West African market.
Influence has also shown to flow in both directions: Dutch wax print companies and
their competitors in the UK are known to have adapted their patterns to appeal to
West African clientele by collecting, observing, and imitating the textiles produced in
West Africa. A taste for Indonesian batiks along the Gold Coast may have originated

101
Christopher Burghard Steiner, “Technologies of Resistance: Structural Alteration of Trade
Cloth in Four Societies,” Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 119, no. 1 (1994): 75–94.
102
Tonye Victor Erekosima and Joanne Bubolz Eicher, “Kalabari Cut-Thread and Pulled-
Thread Cloth,” African Arts 14, no. 2 (1981): 48–49.
103
John Picton, “Seeing and Wearing: Textiles in West Africa,” in The Poetics of Cloth:
African Textiles/Recent Art, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York, NY: Grey Art Gallery, New York
University, 2008), 24.
81
with the return of African soldiers who had spent extended periods of time in
Indonesia between 1837 and 1872, prompting the production of European wax
printed textiles made specifically for West African markets.104 Similarly, evidence
found in early trade records points to an adaptation of West African indigo blues to
the production of ‘Guinea’ cloths in India that were destined for West Africa.105 In a
more recent example, the African print manufacturer, Sotiba, designs patterns that
appeal to its clientele in the United States by appropriating motifs such as masks,
drums, and cowrie shells that symbolize Africa to Americans. The fabrics are printed
in Sotiba’s factory in Senegal, where they are then exported to the United States and
branded as “authentic” African prints. To the Senegalese these prints are viewed as
“touristic” and are therefore undesirable. Sotiba produces an entirely different range
of patterns for its clientele in Senegal that closely resembles the designs and
palettes of the Dutch wax fabrics, which they also brand as “authentic” African
prints.106

Intertwined with the processes of synthesis and acculturation, appropriation is critical

to the development of visual culture and it provides insight into the history of cross-
cultural interaction via trade and exploration that preceded the arrival of Europeans
on the African continent. As it has been demonstrated in the last section, until very
recently the histories behind textiles were largely excluded from textile exhibitions, or
their history was limited to information about its production technique that promoted
an “authentic” view of the textile over the cross-cultural aspects of its production. In
part, this accounts for the fact that the exhibitions and their accompanying texts did
not identify the common ground between procedures. Although some of the texts
dealt in overly simplistic terms with the appropriation of textiles as a reference to the
artists’ ‘roots,’ rarely is the act of appropriation addressed as a legitimate artistic
strategy for either the artist or the textile producer. In an instance where
appropriation was addressed in the accompanying catalogue for “Hollandaise” the

104
Françoise Vergès, “The Invention of an African Fabric,” in Hollandaise: A Journey into an
Iconic Fabric, ed. Koyo Kouoh (Dakar, Senegal: Raw Material Company, 2013), 41.
105
Kriger, “‘Guinea Cloth’: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West Africa
before and during the Atlantic Slave Trade.” 106.
106
Leslie W. Rabine, The Global Circulation of African Fashion, Dress, Body, Culture
(Oxford; New York: Berg, 2002), 135–36. See also: Adam Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism:
Dress, Textiles and Culture from the 17th to the 21st Century (London; New Delhi; New
York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013), 187.
82
author notes that the practice existed in textile production long before it was an
artistic strategy, but does not elaborate.107 Like most exhibition texts, the focus was
instead placed intently upon the subject or material of the appropriative act, rather
than on the act itself. This seems to be a missed opportunity for a meaningful way to
discuss the type of artwork that deploys not only textile material, but textile
processes of weaving, printed patterning, quilting, stitching, and dyeing, and perhaps
most importantly the textile’s memories and meanings.

For many artists, the use of textiles cannot be reduced to the vague notion of African
identity that the material may signify. Often, as was the case with Anatsui, this
interpretation comes later. Instead, artists may begin with fabric scraps for utilitarian
and economic reasons. In Nigeria, the availability of cheap fabrics imported from
China and the nation’s reliance on tailor-made clothing produces an enormous
amount of fabric waste that for some artists has become a viable new medium in the
last 10-15 years. Particularly in the context of Lagos, where custom tailoring and the
use of uniforms for family and community events is so common, a new cloth may be
purchased for each special event. The pattern then comes to be identified with the
memory of that specific event and the people involved. Whether it is factory
produced or a handmade piece, it carries its own biography of production and
consumption.

For Lagos-based artist Obinna Makata, the fabric scraps he collected from a local
tailor provided the material for his ink on paper drawings at a time in his early career
when he did not have the finances to buy expensive art supplies (figure 1.4). Yet, the
boldly colored fabric also appealed to his aesthetic sensibility as a painter, and soon
it became apparent that the material was highly symbolic. As the work developed
into a series and was picked up by the owner of an art foundation in Lagos, Makata
began to recognize the analogy between his material of choice and the rampant
consumerism of the Lagos lifestyle. The pressure to conform to an image of success
and luxury through the constant purchasing of new clothes, phones, electronics,
cars, and houses was mediated through Nollywood, music videos, and the fashion
industry, and it permeated every aspect of life from religion to family celebrations. All

107
Vergès, “The Invention of an African Fabric,” 41.
83
of this was embedded in the fabric material.108 Every scrap came from the making of
an individual’s outfit, leaving a piece of evidence of that person’s aesthetic taste,
their economic means (reflected in the price and quality of the fabric), or their
participation in a party or community dressed in a uniform (aso-ebi, owambe). In this
sense, the fabric remembers, and that memory is part of what is brought into the
artwork through its use.

The deployment of a textile’s memory appears a crucial element to its appropriation

into an artist’s practice. Two artists active in Nigeria, George Edozie and Kolade
Oshinowo, utilized specific fabrics in their works that once belonged to loved ones,
thereby inscribing the work with their memory. Oshinowo, who began using the fabric
scraps provided by his daughter who worked as a fashion designer, first saw the
scraps as a practical opportunity to turn waste into art. He began by using the scraps
as a base for his canvases through which he could build up the surfaces and give
them texture. Eventually this lead to the integration of the fabrics into the paintings
where the preexisting pattern was allowed to dictate the palette and the composition.
One of the few paintings he produced with a composition already in mind is a work
titled ‘Engagement’ (figure 1.5). The African print used in this painting was taken
from the ceremony of his late sister’s funeral, but the painting depicted the
engagement of his nephew to his fiancée.109 The pattern featured a geometric
design that gave the illusion of volume. This in turn gave immense depth when he
used it to paint a group of people gathered together at the family event. The pattern
allowed the group to appear to swell and vibrate, mimicking the movement of a real
crowd, while borrowing the associated memories of his departed sister held within
the pattern to give the work personal resonance.

For Edozie, using fabric was a natural transition from the medium of paper collage
he was working in prior to 2006. Like Makata, his works feature primarily the African
print variety, but following the passing of his mother he integrated fabrics that
belonged to her, including a mud cloth indigenous to Eastern Nigeria. As more and
more artists began using fabric scraps as a paint medium, Edozie transitioned again
to working in sculpture by wrapping and tying the fabric to wire and metal structures.

108
Obinna Makata, interview with Erin Rice, April 14th, 2014, Lagos, Nigeria
109
Kolade Oshinowo, interview with Erin Rice, June 7th, 2012, Lagos, Nigeria
84
The works also became increasingly critical in their content, addressing issues such
as the corruption in the oil industry and national politics, but the textile remained the
primary material with which he worked.110

This shift to a critical mode of using textiles is significant. Edozie's large-scale wire
and fabric structure titled "VIP" or "Vagabond in Power" was destined for installation
in the lobby of a hotel in Lagos. A metaphor for the intimate relationship between
powerful "big men" in the Nigerian government handing out scraps to the "near
starved little people" below them and "big men" in the oil industry (both of whom
siphon off the nation's resources and pocket the profits), "VIP" originally featured a
fuel pump in place of the figure's genitalia. This was too literal and too controversial
for the hotel, however, and the pump was removed.111 The scraps of fabric that are
knotted to the wire skeleton, however, might be interpreted to provide this same link
between the corruption of men in power and the fuel industry, albeit in a subtler way
than the fuel pump. The domestic mass-production of printed cloth in Nigeria was
once a vibrant industry, but fell victim in part to the insufficiencies of the nation's
infrastructure, which included a lack of oil refineries to match the vast quantities of oil
extraction from Nigerian land. This resulted in the importation of expensive, low-
grade, black market fuel, making it nearly impossible to meet the energy needs of
large factories. As the government failed to remedy the infrastructure, nor make
significant efforts to save the industry, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians eventually
lost their jobs.112

Both Makata's allusion to the consumerism demanded by Lagos society and

Edozie's "VIP" composed of fabric scraps use the textile as an allegory for criticisms
they can not always voice in public. The procedure of appropriation of course, as
well as the method of montage, is historically grounded in allegory and social
critique. The use of fabric scraps, as opposed to whole cloths, allows for the
fragmentation of the patterns. Whereas some of the personal associations with
specific cloth are retained, some pieces might be small enough that the original
pattern is no longer discernable. In bringing together the scraps from many cloths in

110
George Edozie, interview with Erin Rice, April 16, 2014, Lagos, Nigeria
111
George Edozie, interview with Erin Rice, April 16, 2014, Lagos, Nigeria
112
Sola Akinrinade and Olukoya Ogen, “Globalization and De-Industrialization: South-South
Neo-Liberalism and the Collapse of the Nigerian Textile Industry,” The Global South 2, no. 2,
Africa in a Global Age (Fall 2008): 165.
85
2D montage and 3D installations, new wholes are composed and meaning is
renegotiated. By disintegrating the individual patterns, larger issues related to
industrial textiles in general become accessible. As Benjamin Buchloh has argued in
relation to early montage artists George Grosz, Johnny Heartfield, and other German
Dada artists' and poets' ability to strip words or visual symbols down to their shells,
"The procedure of montage is therefore one in which all allegorical principles are
executed simultaneously: appropriation and depletion of meaning, fragmentation and
dialectical juxtaposition of fragments, and the systematic separation of signifier and
signified. In the sense of Walter Benjamin's definition of the allegorical, one could
say that the allegorical mind arbitrarily selects from the vast and disordered material
that a person's knowledge has to offer."113 Buchloh's interpretation gives the artist a
great deal of agency in the making of meaning through the processes of
appropriation and montage.

The historical connections of Dutch Wax print to colonialism provided the substance
for Shonibare’s engagement with the contemporary Western notion of African
identity. He recognized the subversive capacity of the textile and appropriated them
along with other materials and references into carefully constructed tableaux.
Working in a manner that uses textiles from their environment by combining their
imagery and symbolism with other elements unites artists such as Makata, Edozie,
Oshinowo, and Shonibare, even when the end results differ dramatically from one
artist to the next. Based on their appropriative artistic processes, these artists have
precedents not only in the production of textiles or in early 20th century montage, but
also in the art that emerged from the era of Nigerian Modern art.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in

113

Contemporary Art,” in Art After Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth
Buchmann (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 29.
86
 CHAPTER TWO
Adire Eleko in Modern Art: Appropriation and synthesis as artistic strategies
from Zaria and beyond

The Artist as Ethnographer

In his book The Return of the Real (1996) Hal Foster suggests that the post-modern
artist is tending towards a practice grounded materially, theoretically, and visually in
real bodies, real sites, real problems, and real histories. In the essay titled “The
Artist as Ethnographer” Foster engages with Walter Benjamin's essay "The Artist as
Producer," which functioned to call artists to side politically and engage materially
with the disenfranchised, or 'the other,’ but made strong warnings against patronizing
the very parts of society they aimed to support. Foster seeks to update Benjamin's
essay by responding to the ethnographic turn in the arts in the decades leading up to
the 1990s, turning the paradigm of the artist from producer to ethnographer and
issuing several similar warnings through examples of art in which the artist
committed the same pitfalls Benjamin described but against the ethnic "other" rather
than the proletariat.

Under the curatorial framework reviewed in the previous chapter that brought
together visual art and African textiles, artists were coaxed into the role of
ethnographer. He or she was responsible for recovering, understanding, and
representing cultural heritage on behalf of the original producers. More often than
not, the identities of the producers of the textiles were not made known, nor were
they presented as artists. Instead, the visual artists largely determined the meaning
of the textiles, which were removed from their original context of production and use.

Foster's paradigm of the artist as ethnographer is useful in analyzing the work of

Nigerian artists produced in the 1960s and 1970s. Appropriation played a key role in
artistic practice following independence in 1960. In particular, artists looked to
indigenous sources for aesthetic and symbolic material for use in their own work.
Working as impromptu ethnographers, Foster's critique helps reveal how Nigerian
“tradition” became a foil to Nigerian modernity in the process of appropriating
indigenous culture into art. Increasingly, within the realm of the arts, as modernity is
developed and defined in terms of a higher education, travel to foreign lands, and

87
access to resources, its difference or otherness from that of “tradition” comes into
sharp relief. The 'proletarian’ or ‘ethnic other' becomes the backdrop to the modern
self. The Nigerian artist is still othered in respect to the global art world, but he or she
nevertheless occupies a place in that world, which is one that can rarely be
accessed by those the artist claims to represent.

The modern artist working as ethnographer becomes particularly problematic when

the predominantly male artists appropriate the cultural production of women. Class
and gender as opposed to ethnicity mark their 'otherness.' As its primary aim, this
chapter takes an in-depth look at the appropriation of the indigo dyed textile, adire,
produced by Yoruba women, into the modernist work of Bruce Onobrakpeya. His
work will be thoroughly contextualized in the emergence of the Zaria Art Society, and
compared with Uche Okeke’s appropriation of the female dominated uli painting, a
form of body and wall painting practiced by Igbo women, which has overshadowed
all other forms of appropriation by artists that emerged from the Art Society.
Onobrakpeya’s approach to synthesis will be analyzed through several examples of
his work and excerpts of his writing. The comparison to Okeke will highlight several
similar procedures elected by both artists and identify how the critique of uli’s
appropriation failed to address the gendering of modernism by focusing on the issue
of ownership. Similarly, analyses of Onobrakpeya's practice locate the agency of the
work in the artist's process, rather than in the original material he uses.

A summary of the technological and aesthetic developments of Yoruba indigo dyeing

in the 20th century illustrate how adire became a product of the modern era, and to
an extent a visual representation of the modern state of the nation. These
developments run parallel to the imposition of European modernism both as a
cultural and political hegemonic force that in part shaped Nigerian modernism
through colonial policies, and as a site of artistic resistance for Nigerian artists.
Conceiving of adire’s modernity is critical to understanding the discussion of
Onobrakpeya’s work and the overarching argument put forth in this chapter that the
modernity of women’s production, in this case adire, was undermined by its
appropriation into Nigerian modern art as a representation of “traditional” culture.

This chapter also connects the work emerging from the Zaria school to currents in
broader artistic contexts, including the appropriation and advancements of adire in

88
the work of the Oshogbo School. A section on the processes of preservation serves
to situate Nigerian modernism internationally, as well as to explore possible
explanations for the trend towards appropriation. Specifically, the inclination of artists
in Nigeria to turn to cultural heritage or “tradition” as a source of inspiration for
modernist art is examined as a product of internal and external forces that
encouraged artists to look to the past, bringing to light the complicity of Western
figures in the making of a modern art and art history that excludes and undermines
women’s artistic output. These forces—which operated locally and throughout the
continent as artistic workshops and schools—serve to contextualize Nigerian
modernism within the hegemonic colonial order, revealing similar processes of
othering and gender bias and lending credence to Salah Hassan’s observation that
“…‘modernity’ itself is a European construct that was initially articulated while
‘traditional’ Africa was being colonised.”114

Appropriation as a Subversive Artistic Strategy

Olu Oguibe has argued that within the space of the visual arts the nature of the
nationalist struggle for the African artist was “written through a strategy of
appropriation of the forms of imperial culture.”115 By this he refers specifically to early
modernist artists in Nigeria such as Aina Onabolu who worked in the European
tradition of painting on canvas. Onabolu, referred to as the “Father of Nigerian
Modern Art,” campaigned passionately in the early 20th century for the integration of
an arts curriculum into Nigerian public schools, as well as for his right to paint in the
European tradition. Olu Oguibe, and more recently Chika Okeke-Agulu, have both
championed his mastery of portrait painting as a radical anti-colonial strategy.116 This
position presents a reversal of predominant views on Onabolu’s embrace of a
European representational painting style. Oguibe posits that this was an act in
defiance of colonial policy that deemed colonial subjects unsuited for education in
the fine arts. In place of fine arts, authorities promoted indigenous craft as an

114
Salah Hassan, “The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expressions of the Self
and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics,” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the
Marketplace, ed. Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe (London: Institute of International Visual
Arts (InIVA), 1999), 220.
115
Olu Oguibe, “Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African Art,” Third Text 16, no. 3
(2002): 243.
116
See Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century
Nigeria, 129.; Oguibe, “Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African Art,” 248.
89
acceptable form of creative practice. Colonial policies aided Christian missions in the
destruction of indigenous arts that produced the objects and images missionaries
regarded as idolatrous.117 These conditions created the possibility for two forms of
resistance: “One was to persist with the indigenous forms which colonialism
condemned and sought to obliterate. The other was to hack, to use a most
appropriate colloquialism, into the exclusive space of the antipode, in other words to
possess the contested territory by mastering the forms and techniques of Western
artistic expression in order to cross out the ideological principles resident in its
exclusivity.”118

Both forms of resistance identified by Oguibe are methods of appropriation: one was
the appropriation of the European tradition, exemplified by Onabolu; the other is the
appropriation of indigenous forms to elevate them through modernist artistic
faculties. Both Oguibe and Okeke-Agulu use the late modernists of the 1960s and
1970s, particularly the members of the Zaria Art Society, as examples of this latter
form of appropriation. There are two problems with their position, however: neither
scholar differentiates between the different subjects of appropriation, and this lack of
differentiation becomes important as the artists moved increasingly towards an
appropriative procedure that drew sometimes indiscriminately from indigenous
sources; secondly, neither Oguibe nor Okeke-Agulu addresses the inherent
pejorative of appropriation that is the sometimes ethically questionable taking of
forms, meanings and ideas from one source and relocating them and reusing them
for one’s own purpose, often without permission, or without the proper recognition of
the original source. As the following sections delve into the specific appropriations of
Uche Okeke and Bruce Onobrakpeya, the issues with the claim that the Zaria artists
were radically anti-colonial artists comes into plain view. As the artists work was
produced, promoted, and ultimately written into history, the identities of the people
who created the indigenous culture they appropriated were anonymized, their work
called traditional, trivialized, and their histories schematized.

Natural Synthesis as Nationalism

117
Oguibe, “Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African Art,” 244–45.
118
Oguibe, 245.
90
The members of the Zaria Art Society, active several decades after Onabolu,
developed an approach to nationalism through art that combined the two strategies
of resistance outlined by Oguibe. Working predominantly in canvas painting,
sculpture and other media in which they were formally trained by primarily European
faculty at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria, the society
was formed by a group of male undergraduates in the art department who found the
curriculum to be lacking in content that was relevant to their cultures and interests in
forming a new national identity in the years leading up to independence. To counter
this euro-centricity the students took it upon themselves in 1958 to begin researching
and integrating regional cultural sources into their work from that point forward. The
Art Society gathered together to exchange knowledge about indigenous culture and
to provide a platform through which to expand their study of the fine arts and publish
their writings. At the core of the Art Society’s ideology was a concern for the nation’s
indigenous culture that was at risk of being lost to the influence of colonialism. Many
of them continued working in painting and sculpture, but began looking to Nigeria’s
rich cultural heritage for subject matter, effectively combining Western and Nigerian
influences according to their own preferences, styles and skills. This process they
called ‘Natural Synthesis’ and it defined much of the work that emerged from the
group of eight artists.

The intentions behind the acts of artistic appropriation by the Zaria artists are
articulated in a manifesto that outlined a strategy of combining influences in visual
art. Authored by the group’s founder, the artist and poet Uche Okeke, it advocated
the method of “natural synthesis” whereby the best of Western and Nigerian artistic
traditions, forms, techniques and ideas were selected, merged and transformed in a
new artistic practice to usher in the postcolonial era. Okeke called upon artists
working at the time of independence to bring fresh forms of creative expression that
both pay homage to the rich cultural past, and make strides towards the new nation’s
future. In a sense, Okeke called on his colleagues to become custodians of Nigerian
culture as both instruments of its preservation and its creation. Capturing the sense
of urgency and responsibility that fell to his generation Okeke wrote, “Young artists in
a new nation, that is what we are! We must grow with the new Nigeria and work to

91
satisfy her traditional love for art or perish with our colonial past.”119 In words and
actions the Art Society situated itself close to the new nation’s political pulse and
became implicated in its progress. As a result, much of the work produced by the
group’s members reflected the political struggle of the postcolonial nation state and
served as a site for the enactment of cultural decolonization.120 Putting strategies of
“natural synthesis” into politically oriented artistic practice, the artists turned their
attention to forms of indigenous culture, integrating them into works of art in the
techniques in which they had been formally trained.

In synthesizing ‘old and new, local and foreign’ as Okeke urged, the theme of
national unity over ethnic diversity emerged alongside a concern for the preservation
of the ‘old’ and the ‘local’. Appropriations of indigenous terracotta sculpture, textiles,
body painting and bronze figures into new media became a means of mitigating loss
or change via a spirited, nationalist aesthetic in the interest of political and cultural
progress, aligning the Art Society with broader nationalist objectives of solidarity.
Uche Okeke appealed to his fellow artists to develop Modern African art independent
of foreign influence yet to draw as much from other cultures as they deemed fit and
wed it to native culture.121 The appeal asserted a freedom of the modern artist to
appropriate from whatever source he wished, while synthesis would avert aping
European art or simply copying old local traditions.122

Consistent with Oguibe’s analysis, appropriation and subversion worked in close

collaboration within the various applications of ‘natural synthesis’ to artistic practice.
Yet, not all processes of appropriation are equal and there were distinct differences
between the applications from one Art Society member to another. For example, the
three-dimensional work of Demas Nwoko, who reworked the ancient Nok terracotta
sculptures into his own sculptural language is distinct in its appropriation of ancient
indigenous forms. Named for the location where terracotta figurines and heads were
discovered in Nok, Nigeria, the Nok civilization was believed to have flourished

119
Uche Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” (1960) reprinted in Seven Stories about Modern Art in
Africa (Paris: Flammarion, 1995) 208.
120
Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism : Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century
Nigeria, 14.
121
Okeke-Agulu, 89.
122
Okeke writes “I disagree with those who live in Africa and ape European artists…It is
equally futile copying our old art heritages, for they stand for our old order.” Okeke, “Natural
Synthesis.”
92
sometime between 1000 BCE – 500 CE. Little is known about the sculptural pieces
that they produced, leaving them open to interpretation and speculation. By contrast,
although indigo dyeing has been practiced in West Africa for at least a millennium,
the patterns Bruce Onobrakpeya appropriates are largely 20th century creations.
These patterns are relatively well documented, and tend to have multiple meanings
that are known by those who produce and wear them. Many of the meanings derive
from Yoruba folklore, religion and the natural world and are passed down from one
adire producer to another, or are invented or elaborated by master dyers, who
sometimes sign their names to the cloth. Unlike the Nok terracottas, there is little
ambivalence when it comes to the way the Yoruba interpret patterned indigo cloths,
and scholarship has come a great distance in providing a comprehensive history of
this ancient dyeing practice that has continued into the 21st century.

Unlike the sculptural practices central to indigenous religion that were banned by
missionaries and colonial authorities, textile practice was encouraged as a trade and
a craft. Paternalistic as it may have been, textile as craft was sometimes taught in
schools and was the subject of government-sponsored workshops in places
throughout Yorubaland. Nevertheless, in spite of colonial support, over the course of
the 20th century textiles produced in Yorubaland became a form of anti-colonial
resistance in dress. It was also a thriving industry where women were in control from
production to the point of sale. Therefore, to appropriate indigenous textiles in art is
entirely different from, for example, continuing to practice sculpting in wood, or
appropriating the visual culture of an ancient civilization. Textile design and
production was neither static nor "traditional" but rather an ever-evolving practice
contemporaneous with modernist art.

The artists emerging post-Independence were expressing their political dissent

against colonial influence, but they did so without recognizing the contributions of
cultural producers to the development of a modern visual culture or to colonial
resistance. In the case of adire, this is especially problematic because its producers
were predominantly female, and women were already subjected to decreased
autonomy and power under the colonial order.123 Rather than embrace textile

123
“The inherently sexist attitudes of British colonial officers, conditioned by bourgeois British
attitudes toward women, led to an even greater worsening of the women’s situation.” Cheryl
93
production of the Yoruba or elsewhere into the growing idea of the modern in
Nigeria, they were omitted from it except on the terms of their appropriation into art.
In the context of Nigeria, this problematic gender relation is compounded by the fact
that women were largely absent from the overwhelmingly male Zaria Art Society and
Nigerian Modern art movement.

Uli and the Question of Ownership

In applying a ‘natural synthesis’ to his own artistic practice in the early 1960s, Uche
Okeke adapted the linear forms of uli--the painting of women's bodies, homes and
other surfaces practiced by Igbo women--to compositions on paper. Much of Okeke's
work produced in the years after his graduation from Zaria tested the graphic and
spatial properties of pre-existing uli forms. The principles laid out in his writings were
thus not made immediately manifest in his artwork but emerged from the
experimental period that followed the end of the Art Society. Prior to graduation,
Okeke had been working in representational oil painting that reflected his interest in
European Modernism. Although these early works indicate an interest in line, Okeke
shifted towards abstraction in 1961 with a work called Ana Mmuo (Land of the
Dead). This work was important because it signaled Okeke's realization of the
aesthetic possibilities offered by Igbo visual culture and the development of his own
style.124 Many of the drawings and paintings completed in the years following the
completion of Ana Mmuo utilized a limited variety of repeating linear forms such as
the spiral, frequently found in uli, to compose representational figures.

From then on, Okeke’s artistic production moved increasingly towards the linear and
graphic properties inspired by uli’s visual lexicon that became his signature style.
Okeke’s style influenced a younger generation of artists who dedicated themselves
to the study and experimentation of uli that emerged from Okeke’s teachings and
leadership at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, forming what is now known as the
Nsukka school.

Johnson, “Grass Roots Organizing: Women in Anticolonial Activity in Southwestern Nigeria,”

African Studies Review 25, no. 2/3 (September 1982): 149.
124
Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century
Nigeria, 101.
94
Uli had been an exclusively female art form until Ben Enwonwu, a pioneering
Nigerian modernist painter and sculptor, first reproduced uli motifs in his paintings in
the 1940s, followed by Okeke in the 1960s.125 Both male artists transformed the
motifs by modernist formal procedures, freely modifying the graphic and linear forms
to suit their individual stylistic preferences. The nature of the uli-based work by
Okeke and his followers that largely erased the symbolic underpinnings of uli’s
female production, raised concerns about the appropriation of the motifs. Anchoring
the critiques aimed at Okeke’s graphical use of uli is the question of rightful
ownership over cultural forms and practices. Okeke and the predominantly male
Nsukka group were accused of stealing uli from its female practitioners and imbuing
the art with a male aura.126

Nkiru Nzegwu problematizes the gendered nature of the ownership further by

explaining that uli served as a decorative visual language encoded in proverbial
symbolism that women used to engage in a variety of socio-cultural commentaries.
In relocating the forms from a rural, domestic and gendered space to the elitist space
of modern art the appropriation of uli constituted several important shifts. “These
shifts from public (traditional) spaces to private (modern) spaces, and from rural to
urban locations embody a move from sororal and maternal feelings to individualistic
feelings of fulfillment.”127 Removed from the context of Igbo women by whom and to
whom the uli ideograms speak, the motifs are stripped of their communicative
capacities and bestowed new meaning according to the individual artist. Thus by
transforming uli motifs by aesthetic and conceptual means their authorship is
transferred to the artist.

The extent of this transformation has been so substantial that some scholars have
argued that the synthesized uli found in Okeke’s work and that of his protégées
would not be recognized as uli by classical practitioners. This claim, which has been
used to support the right of the modern artist to use uli forms at will, is corroborated
by several incidents, but ultimately does not absolve the act of appropriation. In the

125
Nzegwu, “Crossing Boundaries: Gender Transmogrification of African Art History,” 3.
126
Sarah Adams, “One Person Does Not Have the Hand of Another: Uli Artists, the Nsukka
Group, and the Contested Terrain in Between,” in The Nsukka Artists and Nigerian
Contemporary Art, by Simon Ottenberg (Washington DC: Smithsonian National Museum of
African Art in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2002), 54–55.
127
Nzegwu, “Crossing Boundaries: Gender Transmogrification of African Art History,” 3.
95
1930s, Kenneth Murray, a British officer working in the education department of
Nigeria’s colonial government, attempted to document uli’s visual vocabulary by
commissioning Igbo women in Umuahia to reproduce the motifs on large pieces of
paper. From these drawings he copied several of the motifs onto smaller squares of
paper. Yet, in removing the motifs from the larger papers where they had been
placed and properly modified according to the spatial dimensions of the paper and in
relation to the other motifs, Murray ruined the proper composition of the forms
according to the uli artists he had consulted.128 The responses of the uli artists
suggest that the forms could not be recorded and saved through transcription. Nor
could the motifs be isolated and still retain their significance since the aesthetic and
conceptual meaning behind uli was contingent upon the entire composition as it was
found on a body or on a wall, which was the true mark of the artist. Uli’s symbolic
meaning was not encapsulated in a singular motif but rather dependent upon the
aesthetic and compositional choices of the artist in collaboration with the client.129

In 1959, Okeke received a similar response from his mother when he questioned her
choice to leave a section of paper blank as she demonstrated her knowledge of uli
painting to him. She explained that the space was already too crowded, indicating
that the underlying principles of design within uli were not just about the forms but
about the negative space surrounding them, and that these principles were
fundamentally different from what Okeke had learned through his artistic training that
was based on European principles of space and form.130

Decades after Murray’s attempted documentation of uli and Okeke’s early tutorials
with his mother, an American scholar of uli history, Sarah Adams, recounted a
comparable experience. Adams was conducting research in Nigeria with the help of
two classical uli artists who served as informants and her uli instructors at the time
when she acquired a dress made by the Nsukka artist Ada Udechukwu. Udechukwu
had embellished the dress with uli-inspired forms painted directly on the plain black
fabric. When Adams wore the dress to show it to the uli artists, Ekedinma Ojiakor
and Martina Okafor, they were not only unimpressed with the garment but they

128
Elizabeth Anne Willis, “Uli Painting and Identity: Twentieth-Century Developments in Art
in the Igbo-Speaking Region of Nigeria” (School of Oriental and African Studies, University
of London, 1997), 103.
129
Willis, 95.
130
Willis, 240.
96
seemed to make no connection between the linear designs and their own work. In
defense of the Nsukka group’s appropriation of uli, Adams used this anecdote to
argue that amongst classical uli painters there were no claims of ownership of the
forms. Rather, she discovered uli artists copied patterns freely from one another. It
was not the motifs alone that defined the practice of uli but a combination of motifs
and their spatial arrangements according to the particular body or space it occupied.
It came down to each artist having her own unique style that could not be imitated or
owned by anyone else.131

Murray, Okeke and Adams supported the right of artists, male or female, to
appropriate freely from uli’s visual vocabulary. Their experiences implied that uli
defies ownership in a number of ways: by its inherent impermanence through the
use of natural dyes on bodies that fade away after several days, and the need for
regular maintenance and protection from the climate for outdoor murals; the
subtleties of aesthetics that shift from one artist’s hand to another such that even in
the imitation of a design each rendition is nevertheless unique; and lastly, the fact
that each of these individuals was able to consult a classical uli artist shows that
even as uli took on new dimensions on canvases, paper, clothing, and sculpture
following multiple appropriations by modernist artists, classical uli continued to be
practiced.

In other words, Murray, Okeke and Adams attempt to overturn the underlying
assumption that the appropriation of uli was detrimental to the classical uli
practitioners to whom the motifs belonged. The defense was hinged on the argument
that uli, by its own nature, was not owned by anyone. Yet, this defense reconciles
only one aspect of the artistic procedure that appropriated, transformed, synthesized
and reframed uli. Rather than resolve the dispute over whether appropriations of uli
are justified, the explanation that the motifs defy ownership indicates a misdirection
of the gendered critique of appropriation. The inherent issue with appropriation is
not, in this case, about ownership but in the nature of appropriation under the
paradigm of ‘natural synthesis’ that called for both the transformation of indigenous
sources but also for the artist to be in service of its preservation, two demands that

Adams, “One Person Does Not Have the Hand of Another: Uli Artists, the Nsukka Group,
131

and the Contested Terrain in Between,” 56.

97
contradict one another. In blending old and new, local and foreign, ‘natural synthesis’
also entailed the framing of culture into categories of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional,’
‘foreign’ and ‘indigenous,’ ‘art’ and ‘craft,’ even where the terms did not accurately
apply, providing an artificial construct into which practices such as uli were placed as
‘traditional indigenous craft’ and against which the ‘modern’ was created.

Uli, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Art.

The ‘modern’ has long been built upon a tenuous definition of ‘tradition’ that relies on
tradition’s associations with the past and its evocations of conservatism and
immutability. As Rosalind Krauss has argued, at the very core of the avant-garde
movement in the West was a belief in the originality of modern art that lay within the
individual’s possession of an “imaginary naiveté” freed from contamination of
tradition.132 Upholding this belief in originality was the assumption that the production
of the past was incapable of the spontaneity, radicalism, and imagination to which
the avant-garde aspired. As modern art reached its apex in the West in the form of
Abstract Expressionism, its ideals were defined by influential critics such as Clement
Greenberg as being completely void of the functionality and decoration he believed
was embodied by ‘traditional’ arts.

’Natural synthesis’ operated through the construction of a similar traditional-modern

paradigm, which, rather than remove all traces of the past, set modernity in stark
relief against it. The classic scenario went “an artist studies an art form indigenous to
his ethnicity and reformulates a modernist aesthetic and formal style on the basis of
that art.”133 For Okeke, artistic reformulation pushed the boundaries of uli's
manifestation and meaning at the same time that it created a distinction: uli was
merely the source (frequently referred to as “tradition” or “heritage”) with which the
artists worked and drew inspiration while what the artist produced was art. The
“modern” in the work of Okeke and his peers was found in juxtaposition with the “not
modern.” Difference was identified and amplified as tradition through associations
with the past and continuity, whereas modernity embodied the future and change.

132
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 157.
133
Chika Okeke-Agulu and John Picton, “Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Modernism in
Nigeria: The Art of Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, 1960-1968: [With Commentary],”
African Arts 39, no. 1 (2006): 26.
98
Although uli co-existed simultaneously with the emergence of ‘modern’ art, its
difference was projected and to an extent constructed to emphasize the modernity of
‘modern’ art. What was erased or obscured, therefore, was the contemporaneity of
the classical uli practice and any resemblance it bore to the emerging idea of
modernity.

Over-emphasizing the ‘traditionality’ of uli was only one of the ways women’s cultural
production was omitted from the formation and historiography of modern art in
Nigeria. Anonymity played a large role, much as it did in the ways non-Western art
was appropriated and framed by artists, art historians, collectors and curators in the
West. Okeke and his contemporaries frequently framed the cultural forms they
appropriated as produced anonymously by ascribing it to an ethnic group. In the
example of Zaria, the artists in the society were encouraged to do research on
indigenous culture that would serve to both educate the Art Society members, enrich
the conceptual aspect of their artworks, and "preserve" the indigenous practices for
posterity.134 However, the version of uli and Igbo culture that Okeke promoted both in
his artwork and through his research was based solely on the Nri-Awka in the
Anambra basin where his family comes from.135 Okeke promoted the cultural
production of the Nri-Awka towns as pan-Igbo, fostering a homogenous perspective
of the Igbo ethnic group over its heterogeneous and complex reality. Even within that
region, differences in uli aesthetics from artist to artist, village to village were erased
in Okeke’s schematic view.136 Okeke’s influence has been so far-reaching it has
been suggested that the Nri-Awka style is now representative of all Igbo uli
painting.137 Personally, Okeke credits only his mother with teaching him everything
she knew about uli, and makes reference to Asele, an uli designer from Igbo
mythology that brought the practice to earth.138 More broadly, uli was redefined

134
“The strong conceptual link between their art forms and the cultural traditions reflects
part of the Igbo artists’ concern toward the preservation of their indigenous cultural heritage”
see: Chukwuemeka Vincent Okpara, “The Igbo Art and Cultural Heritage: Changing Time,
Changing Form,” Sociology Study 2, no. 12 (December 2012): 903.
135
Willis, “Uli Painting and Identity: Twentieth-Century Developments in Art in the Igbo-
Speaking Region of Nigeria,” 244–45.
136
Elizabeth Péri, “Varieties and Qualities in Uli Painting,” in The Nsukka Artists and
Nigerian Contemporary Art, ed. Simon Ottenberg (Washington DC; Seattle: Smithsonian
National Museum of African Art; University of Washington Press, 2002), 37–51.
137
Willis, “Uli Painting and Identity: Twentieth-Century Developments in Art in the Igbo-
Speaking Region of Nigeria,” 244–45.
138
Uche Okeke named his cultural institute Asele, after this mythical designer. Willis, 247.
99
through Okeke's narrow vision, rather than by comprehensive research, resulting in a
simplified version of the Igbo cultural heritage that may have erased, rather than
preserved, a great range of variation in uli practice.

The simplification of Igbo visual culture under Okeke's ethnographic research is

reminiscent of the problematic origin of African art history as an offshoot of
anthropology and ethnography written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in
Europe. African objects were considered neither as art nor worthy of in-depth
research that would have revealed much about their production. Born out of the
discipline of anthropology, African art history began with an attempt to focus
exclusively on the forms of African sculpture. Carl Einstein's influential Negerplastik
attempted in 1915 to convince his European readership that African sculpture was
art, even if it did not conform to popular notions of beauty. He did so by compiling a
collection of photographs of sculptures, unprecedented in both quantity of images,
and the consistency of stylistic treatment. The objects were photographed
individually, isolated from cultural context, against a neutral background, well-lit, in
soft-focus, and from multiple perspectives. The results gave the reader the ability to
compare one to another on the basis of form alone. Einstein's tactic was to
aestheticize non-Western objects in a way that was visually appealing and familiar to
his Western audience, but reduced each piece to a pure sculptural form devoid of
any information about its maker, size, origin or use.139

Einstein's publication capitalized on a rising interest amongst Europeans in African

culture. A few years prior to Negerplastik, Leo Frobenius published his archeological
findings in West Africa from 1910-1912. His discovery of a naturalistic copper alloy
head undermined European understandings of African aesthetics, and also
disproved the belief that Africans were without a rich history. However, Frobenius'
groundbreaking discoveries were tainted by his claims that the works were not
African, but rather from the lost civilization of Atlantis, indicating his inability to
conceive of an ancient African art of such high quality, even when the concrete
evidence lay before him.

Z.S. Strother, “Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” African Arts 46, no. 4
139

(Winter 2013): 8–9.

100
Frobenius's false attribution and Einstein's lack of attribution were common practice
in the early 20th century. In European institutions and literature African cultural
objects were frequently attributed to groups or workshops, or assumed anonymous,
even when the name of the artist was available or known. Such was the case with
the British exhibition of the carved palace doors by Olowe of Ise, who remained
unnamed for decades after its initial showing in England in 1924.140 These practices
were not without their critics however, and for some artists, the institutional treatment
of non-Western objects presented an opportunity for critical intervention. A mask, for
example, from the Ivory Coast that had been attributed to the Guro people was later
credited to a single man known as the Master of Buaflé.141 An image of the mask is
used in German Dada artist Hannah Höch’s collage titled “Monument I” (1924-1928).
Höch used images culled from an ethnographic journal to challenge the European
reception of African objects, particularly in a series of photomontages titled From an
Ethnographic Museum (1924 – 1930s). The series appropriated photographs of
African sculptures and masks as metonyms for people under colonial oppression.
Höch claimed, “I wanted to show up the unscrupulous simplistic use of the negro
sculpture from Africa that was flooding Europe at the time.”142 Images of African
objects were frequently combined with images of women from mass media. Hoch
drew parallels between modes of exoticization and anonymization of women’s
bodies and colonial subjects.

Anonymity was promoted in scholarship, curatorial practice, and for many European
artists who were not taking a critical stance in the way that Höch was, it made the
forms easy to repurpose in experimental art making. Dada artists, as well as their
cubist predecessors and contemporaries, appropriated heavily from African visual
culture, utilizing aspects of African sculpture and masks in styles that actively
resisted accepted modes of artistic representation in European bourgeois culture,
but that neglected to recognize the original source.

From the colonial perspective, refusing to recognize individuals as artists was a

hegemonic strategy within the cultural sector that perpetuated constructions of

140
Roslyn Adele Walker, “Olowe of Ise,” African Arts 31, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 38.
141
“Dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other (Exhibition Brochure)” (Museum Rietberg;
Berlinische Galerie, 2016).
142
“Dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other (Exhibition Brochure).”
101
difference, guaranteeing dependence of the colony on the colonial authority. 143
Applying this notion in the context of Nigerian modernism, difference is constructed
by class and gender rather than race or ethnicity. As Nigeria’s modernist artists
repeatedly turned to indigenous visual culture they rarely, if ever, recognized the
individuals who produced those pre-existing forms of culture. Instead, the work was
attributed to ethnic groups even when the individual names of master practitioners
were known. Since these artists were often working at the same time as the
modernist artists the removal of their names from the forms they produced served to
undermine their contemporaneity. This helped frame indigenous culture as
“traditional” even when many of its forms defied the problematic definition of
“tradition” by virtue of its continued practice and, more importantly, its adoption of
modernity on its own terms.

One method of framing indigenous culture as “traditional” was to place modernist art
in the service of its preservation. The Zaria artists positioned themselves as the
saviors of indigenous culture by orienting their practice towards cultural research and
the appropriation of African forms into painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture.
Appropriation was key to this strategy because it ensured that indigenous forms
would not simply be copied, but rather changed and revived through modernist
artistic procedure. The Zaria manifesto implied that the preservation of certain
traditions could be achieved through inclusion and synthesis in modernist art, even
as the necessary component of change in processes of appropriation and synthesis
belied the possibility of real preservation. Indeed, the Zaria artists manipulated,
simplified and decontextualized appropriated forms to such an extent that much of
the forms’ original visual and symbolic meaning was significantly altered or erased.

A year after the initial gathering of the Zaria Art Society, Okeke wrote, “We must not
live always in the past – exhibiting Nok, Igbo Ukwu, Ife, Benin and so on, glorifying
the past to the detriment of the future. We should love the past, if we may, and get
our inspirations from it.”144 Okeke stipulates the distinct role of the artist to take from
the past but to change it sufficiently that it may serve the present and future. But the
past and tradition do not necessarily go hand in hand. In delineating between

143
Oguibe, “Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African Art,” 244.
144
Uche Okeke, “Growth of an Idea (Zaria, 1959),” reprinted in Seven Stories about Modern
Art in Africa (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 210–11.
102
“traditional” forms and “modern” ones, difference, in the form of “traditionality” was
enacted and emphasized in visual as well as conceptual ways, while difference
along ethnic lines was being eliminated.

Despite Okeke’s commitment to his own Igbo identity and his interest in preserving
indigenous Igbo culture, his view was aligned with his nationalist political leanings
that sought to avoid inter-ethnic conflict. Part of the nationalist political cause was
the belief in the necessity of transcending ethnic difference in order to unite diverse
people as a nation. Such beliefs were promulgated by artists in visual materials that
would reach the general public in the forms of postage stamps and posters and other
paraphernalia that pleaded with citizens to “Think Nigeria: Bury ethnic and religious
difference” as a poster by artist Gani Odutokun put it.145 Under the guise of ethnic
indifference and national identity, artists were granted de facto access to all forms of
culture that fell under the rubric of “Nigerian.” His otherness in relation to colonial
hegemony placed him and his colleagues in political alignment with his fellow
countrymen. This made it possible for artists like Okeke and Onobrakpeya to borrow
freely from Igbo, Yoruba, Urhobo, or Hausa cultural elements and synthesize them in
an artwork, while they were actively defining what it meant to be modern through
access to higher education and travel. Anonymity and homogenization via
appropriation worked in concert with the nationalist objective, reserving the
modernist aesthetic and experience as a privileged and male one.

There is ample evidence of classical uli practitioners working before, during and
following the Zaria and Nsukka movements, even though the practice was decimated
under colonialism and later the civil war. Yet, the names and the work of these
women who were solely responsible for shepherding uli well into the late 20th century
went largely unmentioned and undocumented, particularly where their lives and work
might present a contradiction to the prevailing notions of their tradition-bound
practice. Certain analyses of uli have suggested, for example, that Igbo artists living
in certain regions of Eastern Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
developed a great variety of forms in their specific uli lexicon because of their close
proximity to the palm oil trade, bringing more foreign influence to the local culture.146

145
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, ed., Artists of Nigeria (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2012)
261.
146
Péri, “Varieties and Qualities in Uli Painting,” 42.
103
Women in these regions were more exposed to elaborate trade routes and markets
more so than women elsewhere, which may have added a complexity and modernity
to their work that is excluded from later historical accounts. This information unearths
a view of women actively engaged in early global trade and responding to it in artistic
ways. However, the rhetoric of Okeke, his followers and numerous historians of their
work avoided such historical details and continually focused on the decline of the art
of uli, even as the definition of the modern artist came to include the type of artistic
complexity that comes from exposure with foreign culture.

The exclusion of contemporary classical uli artists changed with younger generations
of artists affiliated with the Nsukka group when they took an interest in documenting,
interviewing and sharing the work of living uli practitioners. But the art form continued
to decline to the point of near total disappearance by the end of the first decade of
the 21st century. A painter and scholar of art history from the University of Nigeria
Nsukka, Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi has followed and promoted through his scholarly
work the classical uli artist Eziafo Okaro. She has since passed on. He states, “Most
of the Uli classicists have given up or [are] dead. The art lives in museums, history
books and in the work of a few Nigerian artists. Even that is dying” He also states
there has been recent effort to revive uli through craft.147 The great uli experiment by
artists affiliated with Nsukka may not have preserved the classical uli art form as
intended, but rather spread awareness, and expanded knowledge and
documentation of it.

While anonymization and traditionalizing of women’s cultural production helped

define the realm of arts that included ‘traditional arts’, indigenous arts and craft arts,
the modern arts were set in contrast to these terms. As the Zaria artists pursued
their artistic endeavors into the first decade of independence and onward, their work
seemed to subscribe to pre-existing notions of the ‘modern artist’ even as they
consciously strove to avoid to them. This plays out in the aggrandizement of the
male modern artist (who is identified by creating a certain type of art, and by being
highly educated and well travelled) by critics and scholars as well as in the type of
work that is produced and categorized as modern or not modern. This latter, non-

147
Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi, personal correspondence with Erin Rice via Facebook
Messenger, received August 6, 2016.
104
modern type of work is framed as low art and feminine so as to justify its exclusion
and projected difference. Inclusion comes when the modern artist is inspired by
‘women’s work’ or ‘indigenous arts’ not to produce it himself but to elevate it through
his artistic faculties, thereby assuming part of its authorship.

Within all of these acts—the framing of women’s cultural production as part of the
past, the erasure of cultural specificity and individual identity, and the definition of
modern art through the male experience—the presence and agency of women in
modern history are, in large part, denied. Once again, the European model of
modernism’s development presents parallels to the systemic exclusion of women
from Nigeria’s art history. The absence of women in Western art history is explained
in part by several factors: there were fewer women artists because women were not
granted the same opportunities and privileges as men to pursue an education or a
profession in the arts; women who overcame the odds to become artists were
marginalized by or excluded from written histories; and lastly, beginning in the
Renaissance and continuing well into the 20th century the art forms that women
dominated such as embroidery were denigrated as craft, mechanical arts, low arts,
or decorative while the male dominated art forms of painting and sculpture were
considered “high art.” Together, these factors point to a pervasive sexism that was
not limited to individual artistic practice or societal constraints but that was
institutionalized through art criticism and theory, the formation of the canon, and
curatorial practice. Beyond Europe, they were integral to the formation of a value
system that was applied to arts in Nigeria internally via colonialism and externally via
the scholarly reception and analysis of African arts.

Adire Eleko: The modernization of indigo dyeing

Although Uche Okeke advocated for a trans-ethnic approach to art making in his
writing, his artistic practice demonstrated a devotion to Igbo culture in both form and
content. Bruce Onobrakpeya, by contrast, utilized an approach that combined
multiple ethnic sources in singular works. A prolific printmaker and one of the artists
of the Art Society, Onobrakpeya answered Okeke’s call to bring together indigenous
and foreign forms by synthesizing a vast array of artistic, literary and folkloric
sources from Urhobo oral tradition to royal Benin sculpture in a variety of modern
media. Among these diverse appropriated sources are geometric and figurative

105
patterns that draw directly upon the indigo dyeing practice of Yoruba women called
adire.

Onobrakpeya, maintained an enduring commitment to appropriation and synthesis

over the span of several decades. A bronzed lino relief from 1971, titled Uli,
demonstrates both his commitment to synthesis over a decade after Okeke wrote his
manifesto and the appropriation of women’s artistic production in two forms: uli and
the patterns of indigo dyed textiles (figure 2.1). The image consists of an elongated
and highly stylized figure at the center of the composition flanked on either side by a
row of squares containing geometric patterns. An oval form floats above the figure’s
head and appears to be encircled by numerous arms. The rendering of the central uli
form is at once reminiscent of the elongated linear designs that characterized
Okeke’s drawings and is indicative of Onobrakpeya’s signature stylization that would
be developed through his experimentation with printmaking techniques.

According to the artist’s description of the image, the main motif is a woman who
carries a vial on top of her head containing the natural plant dyes used in uli painting
surrounded by “traditional geometric patterns.”148 The description makes clear what
the image does not: that the figure is a woman practicing the art of uli. The remark
about “traditional geometric patterns” is more misleading, however. These geometric
forms appear with high frequency in Onobrakpeya’s work from the late 60s and for
several decades to follow, and while they too were produced by women (a credit he
gives elsewhere) they are not exactly “traditional.”149 As John Picton has pointed out,
“adire is the ‘classic’ example of a ‘traditional’ textile that is nothing of the kind:
rather, it is a form that effectively takes apart the very notion of traditionality.” 150 But
as was the case with the appropriation and synthesis of uli, traditionality was a
necessary component for modern art. Where the Uli lino relief exemplifies
Onobrakpeya’s layering and synthesis of indigenous visual forms his writing
highlights the importance of tradition in the artistic process:

…The modern Nigerian artist, also, in the spirit of cultural revival and
synthesis has turned to traditional art and good African values for

148
Richard A. Singletary, Bruce Onobrakpeya (New York, NY: The Ford Foundation, 2002),
150.
149
See “The Blue Motifs” in: G.G. Darah and Safy Quel, eds., Bruce Onobrakpeya: The
Spirit in Ascent (Lagos, Nigeria: Ovuomaroro Gallery, 1992), 137.
150
Picton, Becker, and Barbican Art Gallery, The Art of African Textiles, 16.
106
 inspiration. I use "good African values" because this is where synthesis
comes in. Synthesis here means accepting what is good and beautiful in
our culture and enriching it with worthwhile ideas from abroad to create
new sets of values or forms. Culture is not static, it is always growing. No
people have rejected their past completely, otherwise there will be no
future for them. So I will emphasise that African traditional arts or art forms
derived from them should be seen as beautiful.151
In this statement, Onobrakpeya clarifies his approach to the synthesis of old and
new, local and foreign. He emphasizes the aesthetic value of “traditional” arts and
culture, as well as its inclination towards change, but implies it is necessary for the
artist to intervene to bring culture to new heights through the process of synthesis.
Despite acknowledging the dynamic and changing nature of culture, his statement
also places indigenous culture squarely, problematically, in the past, and makes a
clear distinction between the “modern Nigerian artist” and “traditional arts.” The
“modern Nigerian artist” is an individual charged with the task of cultural revival
through a process of synthesis whereby he must select that which is “good and
beautiful” from the past and enrich it with ideas he has acquired from abroad,
presumably through education and travel. The “traditional arts,” whose producers are
unknown or unnamed, serve as a source of inspiration for the artist and as a foil to
his modernity.

The “traditional geometric patterning” utilized in Onobrakpeya’s Uli print and many
other works that followed are derived from a specific type of adire called adire eleko.
In contrast to tie-dyed and hand-stitched cloth, known as adire oniko and alabere,
adire eleko is a modern fabric. This is especially significant to the reading of
Onobrakpeya’s works that use eleko patterning because it is this modernity that is
undermined by its inclusion in modernist art. Thus, an understanding of how adire
eleko is modern and why that is significant is necessary to analyze its appropriation.

Adire Eleko’s modernity is first and foremost dependent on several technological

factors that both altered its production and allowed for the modernization of its
appearance, which assured its integration into 20th century Nigerian society. Unlike
other forms of indigo dyeing and patterning, eleko, meaning “with paste,” is created
by painting or stenciling the pattern onto the fabric with a resist-agent usually made

151
dele jegede, Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows (Milan: 5 Continents Editions,
2014), 266.
107
of cassava flour allowing the image to remain white or light blue through several dips
in indigo dye baths. The technique likely developed in the first decade of the 20th
century, marking a significant departure from the oniko and alabere types of
patterning practiced up to this point that centered around techniques of tying and
stitching fabric with threads of the raffia plant, and were typically produced on locally
woven cotton cloth.152 The oniko and alabere techniques produce a limited range of
patterns composed of stripes, “moons,” or ringlets. The precise origin of this type of
textile in Yorubaland is unknown, but archaeological finds prove they have been
produced in West Africa since at least the 11th century CE. In particular, an indigo-
dyed coif found in the Tellum Caves in the Bandiagara Escarpment (current day
Mali), dated roughly to the 11th century, features a resist pattern of un-dyed spots
where the fabric had been gathered, revealing similar patterning to 19th and 20th
century samples from Yorubaland.153

While the associations of adire with ‘tradition’ are undoubtedly rooted in the longevity
and continuity that is revealed by the finds at the Bandiagara Escarpment and other
evidence, much of what is called adire today are products of the innovations and
inventions of the early to mid 20th century. The first and arguably most pivotal
moment for the modernization of the adire industry arrived with the widespread
availability and affordability of machine-produced imported cotton from Europe.
Incorporation of these factory-made products may have single-handedly lead to the

152
The development of adire eleko is disputed, but 1910 is suggested by a number of
reliable sources, citing the availability and affordability of machine woven cotton, which
arrived in 1880. The eleko technique is also thought to have been developed at this time in
response to a demand for printed cloth, all of which were imported up until this development.
See Pat Oyelola, “The Beautiful and the Useful: The Contribution of Yoruba Women to
Indigo Dyed Textiles”, The Nigerian Field, 57, (1992): 61. John Picton cites Carolyn Keyes
Adenaike’s unpublished PhD thesis in Picton, Becker, and Barbican Art Gallery, The Art of
African Textiles, 16, 30. Razaq Olatunde Rom Kalilu and Margaret Olugbemisola Areo,
“Origin of and Visual Semiotics in Yoruba Textile of Adire,” Arts and Design Studies 12
(2013): 22–34s. also cites Ulli Beier’s 1957 article in Nigeria Magazine. Colleen Kriger
believes Beier and Wenger’s claim is consistent with the trade records from Lagos around
1910, see Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History, The African Archaeology Series
(Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), 164.
153
. See Rita Bolland, Tellem Textiles: Archaeological Finds from Burial Caves in Mali’s
Bandiagara Cliff, trans. Patricia Wardle (Amsterdam; Leiden; Bamako: Tropenmuseum;
Royal Tropical Institute; Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde; Institut des Sciences Humaines;
Musée des Sciences Humaines; Musée National, 1991), 108, 164.
108
early 20th century expansion and great economic growth of the adire industry.154 The
smooth, tight-weave of cotton sheeting made a new type of patterning with
paintbrushes and stencils possible. For the first time, adire designs incorporated
portraiture, text, and figurative as well as abstract decorative motifs.

The adoption of machine woven cotton and the new patterning techniques were
joined by other technologies such as caustic sodas and synthetic dyes in the 1920s.
All of these innovations served to quicken and simplify the laborious process of
making adire. The transition to printing patterns on adire via painting or stenciling
was also a shortcut to achieving patterns similar to the tied-and-dyed cloths that
Yoruba women had a strong reputation for producing. A quicker means of production
was required to compete with and to supplement the foreign cotton prints flooding
local markets from India and Europe. Thus it was crucial that stenciling, painting and
other methods of applying resist-paste to cotton fulfilled this need at the same time
that it reduced costs.

The foreign prints arriving in Yoruban markets as well as the foreign technologies
that were reinventing textile production at home were contingent upon trans-Saharan
and Atlantic trade routes that connected Yorubaland to the wider world. Beyond the
trade objects that they transported in and out of the region, these networks brought
the women who produced and sold adire into contact with the visual culture of distant
people. Any aesthetic similarities in local production and imported fabric indicated
not only adaptations to production in adire centers such as Lagos, Abeokuta, and
Ibadan, but a series of transactions in the exchange of visual culture through the
printed textile. Records from the 19th century suggest that cloths like adire influenced
the production of printed cottons abroad, which indicate a strategy employed by
foreign manufacturers to produce fabrics that would sell successfully in West African
markets.155 Although the adire industry would eventually come to be largely eclipsed
by the factory-produced print, the impact of adire’s pattern language on the
production of these factory imports from Europe and Asia was significant because it
changes the perception of West Africa in early trade from a minor to a major player.

154
Judith Byfield, “Innovation and Conflict: Cloth Dyers and the Interwar Depression in
Abeokuta, Nigeria,” The Journal of African History 38, no. 1 (1997): 80.
155
Vlisco kept swatches and notes on West African indigo in its ledgers. See John Picton,
Rayda Becker, and Barbican Art Gallery., The Art of African Textiles : Technology, Tradition,
and Lurex (London: Barbican Art Gallery ; Lund Humphries Publishers, 1995), 24.
109
As printed adire continued to be produced well into the 20th century alongside other
modernized versions of patterns, such as those machine-stitched and dyed, the
stylistic and functional characteristics of adire and print cloth frequently overlapped.

As foreign factory prints in Europe were adapted to look more like West African
indigo cloth, various elements of the hand-painted eleko patterns alluded to the
impact of cross-cultural contact on textile production within Yorubaland. The adire
eleko motifs utilized in Onobrakpeya’s Uli print and shown in the form of six squares
that flank the uli figure on either side, for example, are derived from a pattern called
Olokun, an eleko cloth typically composed of ten squares, which are doubled by
combining two rectangular cloths, and surrounded by smaller squares (figure 2.2).

Painted entirely in free-hand, the Olokun is composed of twenty main squares, ten
on each of two halves of fabric sewn together such that the main squares are in the
center, while smaller rectangles containing reptiles, birds, fish and scorpions form
the periphery.156 The large squares contain motifs that have been identified (with
some variation) as mats, umbrellas, matches, tops, scissors, four-legged stools,
sticks, leaves, chicken wire, and flowers, some of which may represent the goddess
of the sea in religious iconography of the Benin Kingdom for which the pattern is
named. The women who painted cloths such as the Olokun eleko cloth were
inspired by diverse sources that were brought to them via trade, migration, and
colonization, and reflect the multiethnic, cosmopolitan nature of the city of Lagos in
the late 19th century where the cloth was produced.157

The goddess Olokun is also revered as a religious figure in some parts of

Yorubaland, particularly in a city like Lagos that is close to the sea and had ties to
the Benin court.158 The deity’s devotees believed she would bestow wealth and
many children upon them, bringing many women to her worship, and perhaps
providing an explanation for the continuity of the two religious cosmologies and the
appearance of the four-legged stool symbol that appeared in Benin bronzes long
before the invention of adire eleko. The Olokun pattern not only draws upon the
visual and theological repertoire of the ancient Benin Kingdom, but visual parallels in

156
Picton and Mack, African Textiles, 157.
157
For full analysis of this pattern see: Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 154–59.
158
Kriger, 154–55.
110
this and other adire eleko patterns can be found in Akan adinkra cloths, Indian
woodblock prints and European factory prints, asserting that the demographic of 19 th
century Lagos which was made up of people from across West Africa, Europe, Brazil
and Cuba created in the Olokun a “product of this multiethnic and multicultural
city”.159 Thus, the Olokun, like some works by the Zaria Art Society, is also
composed of appropriated and synthesized elements. In this sense, the Olokun adire
cloth is arguably both chronologically and conceptually as “modern” as any other 20th
century work of art.

Adire eleko’s modernity was not limited to its technological development or

innovative aesthetics. Since men were employed to cut the stencils used in
patterning some cloths, eleko also broke with gender conventions of labor, bringing
men directly into adire’s production line for the first time. Gender conventions were
ruptured again in the 1960s as men began wearing adire in the form of tailored
tunics.160 By this time, adire’s sartorial role for women had also undergone drastic
changes. For the vast majority of its history, adire was considered a cloth for poor,
rural women.161 This was in part because prior to the introduction of factory woven
cotton, adire was often made from an old, worn out or stained cloth that was
renewed by indigo dyeing.162 For those who wore it, it was an everyday cloth worn
wrapped around the body above the breasts. The very rare presence of adire in
photographs from the early 20th century also suggests that adire was not a fabric
worn on special occasions when photographs were more likely to be taken.163

Over the course of the 20th century, the associations of the cloth with rural dress
slowly began to disappear as adire was reinvented through its methods and
materials of production, giving rise to new patterns, new colors, and new styles of
dress made possible by tailoring. As the push for independence from Britain

159
Kriger, 155.
160
Jane Barbour, “Adire Cloth in Nigeria - 1989,” The Nigerian Field 55 (1990): 66.
161
Kalilu and Areo, “Origin of and Visual Semiotics in Yoruba Textile of Adire,” 26.
162
John Picton, Rayda Becker, and Barbican Art Gallery, The Art of African Textiles:
Technology, Tradition, and Lurex (London: Barbican Art Gallery; Lund Humphries
Publishers, 1995), 15.
163
This is an observation I make based on having searched numerous photographic
collections for evidence of adire in use, including National Archives in London, Smithsonian,
Nigerian Nostalgia online collection, and the small number of photographs used in texts,
many of which date to later in the 20th century.
111
intensified and was realized in 1960, adire became a sartorial choice for Lagos elites
who sought to express their rejection of European values through dress.164
Foreigners aligned with the anti-colonial movement also took to wearing local fabrics.
As one scholar put it, “cloths like adire allowed consumers to be simultaneously
‘modern’ and ‘traditional.’ Untailored wrappers and dyed indigo cloths placed women
at the beginning of the twentieth century in the same cultural universe with women at
the mid nineteenth century, but they had modernized that universe through the use
of imported cloths, tailored blouses, and resist patterning.”165

Adire also had an enormous impact on the economy of Yoruba dyeing towns. By
1912, cloth was Nigeria’s largest import with a value that would more than double in
the first decade and a volume that reached an annual 100 million square yards. An
estimated 25% of these imports were consumed in Abeokuta where local dyeing
compounds were turning out record exports and profits.166 Adire from Yorubaland
had developed a reputation as a high-quality indigo cloth in West African markets
and was in demand throughout the coast from the Congo to Senegal.167 A strong
reputation and ties to international trade continued to bring unprecedented economic
wealth and sovereignty to women dyers up until the mid-1920s. However, integration
with the global economy also meant that the Nigerian textile market was very
susceptible to the decline of international markets following the stock market crash of
1929 and the economic depression that ensued.

The quality of adire cloths also began to decline. The connection to international
trade brought technological changes to the local production of indigo cloths that set
eleko apart from its predecessors. But beyond the technical alterations to production,
the adoption of modern chemical additives also provided practical economic
solutions in hard times. Many women turned to adding caustic sodas and synthetic
indigo to their dye formula to survive the economic crisis and a shortage of natural
indigo.168 Unfortunately, the widespread adoption of additives had unintended and

164
Kalilu and Areo, “Origin of and Visual Semiotics in Yoruba Textile of Adire,” 26.
165
Judith A. Byfield, The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in
Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1890-1940, Social History of Africa Series (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 2002), 70.
166
Judith A. Byfield, 53-56.
167
Byfield, “Innovation and Conflict: Cloth Dyers and the Interwar Depression in Abeokuta,
Nigeria,” 77.
168
Byfield, 91.
112
undesired outcomes. By decreasing the duration and difficulty of the dyeing process
the introduction of these new chemicals encouraged women with little or no skill in
indigo dyeing to try their hand in the business. The new competition angered veteran
dyers who were already struggling to remain profitable and pay their debts to the
European firms that lent credit to their businesses. The influx of unskilled dyers also
had a detrimental effect on the product quality. Overuse of caustic soda proved to
damage the integrity of the cotton cloth and the synthetic indigo created a blue finish
that did not hold up to the depth, intensity and fastness of color as cloths dyed
organically with natural indigo.169

The combination of new chemicals and a low-skill workforce severely undermined

the quality of cloth and began to destroy the reputation of Yoruban indigo in foreign
markets, forcing adire producers to turn to colonial authorities and local leaders for
help in protecting the industry. The local leader, the Alake, responded with attempts
to limit the use of caustic soda and synthetic dye and implement regulations
pertaining to adire production. When these new regulations were not observed,
however, he banned the soda and dye entirely to the dismay of many dyers. 170

The new colonial order had also brought its own challenges to dyeing
establishments. For one, colonial authorities under pressure from the League of
Nations outlawed a system of pawned labor that made up a large percentage of the
adire workforce. These laborers were often responsible for preparing the ingredients
for the fermentation of natural indigo. Without their workforce in place or with access
to modern chemicals dyers found themselves unable to produce at the volume and
pace that was necessary to remain profitable. Furthermore, in order to protect itself
from the economic stress brought on by the depression the government expanded
tax collection, putting an additional financial strain on women.171 Left with no choice,
many women continued using caustic soda and synthetic dye against the orders of
the Alake. In February of 1936 police began arresting people and confiscating cloths
from the women who did not comply with the Alake’s orders.172

169
Byfield, 92.
170
Byfield, 95.
171
Byfield, 88–89.
172
Byfield, 96.
113
The interference with the indigo dyeing industry by the Alake and colonial authorities
prompted outrage and political action on the part of women in the area of Abeokuta.
Whereas economic difficulty and increased competition had previously provoked
animosity and division amongst dyers, they were united by their defiance of the
Alake’s authority. The prolonged conflict ushered in an era of political action whereby
the market women of Abeokuta allied themselves to regain their autonomy. This
placed adire and the women who dyed and sold the cloth in political alignment with
other market women and women’s rights activists who were fighting against the
taxation and import sanctions imposed by local authorities. Consequently, adire
became integrated into the political landscape and affiliated with the anti-colonial
movement that extended beyond the markets of Abeokuta and connected these
women to movements that were aimed at rejecting European hegemony by political
action or choice of dress.173

The dissenting voices of women from multiple backgrounds and social classes in
Abeokuta were united under a single woman, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, who sought
to empower working class and illiterate women by teaching them to read and
providing the necessary resources for them to fight government taxation and
interference in their businesses at the market. Brought together under the name
Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU), the market women formed a powerful group that
was emboldened by their leader who refused to pay her taxes. By the 1940s, Kuti’s
political vision had become clearer and more radicalized. She decided to abandon
Western clothing in favor of Yoruba style wrappers that had the dual effect of erasing
the socio-economic differences between her and the women she represented, as
well as make an anti-colonial statement of cultural pride through dress.174 With all
members of the AWU dressed alike, they made a visual statement of solidarity,
particularly as they took to the streets of Abeokuta to demand that the Alake step
down from his position.

These events from adire’s history are critical to understanding how adire became not
only a technologically modern product, but an emblem of modernity. They reveal

173
Byfield, The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in Abeokuta
(Nigeria), 1890-1940, 69–74.
174
Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Nina Emma Mba, For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo
Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 66.
114
how those who produced it and wore it were implicated in the social, economic and
political milieu of the early to mid 20th century. Their actions as cultural producers,
businesswomen, activists and citizens convey the extent of their influence. As these
events unfolded during the tumultuous decades of the 1920s and 1930s, adire
producers continued to create new patterns that reflected and responded to
changing times. Many of these changes took place alongside the emergence and
development of Nigeria’s modern art movement. Yet, as Modern Nigerian art
developed over the course of the 20th century and adire was appropriated into its
idiom, these events that testify to both adire’s modernity and to the agency of the
women who produced it were left out.

Adire in Modern Art

Okeke and his followers perceived of uli as traditional and indigenous culture, and it
was on this basis that they adapted its forms into modern art. This served to both
fulfill the desires laid out in Okeke’s manifesto for the Art Society to conceive of a
new art for a new nation that neither copied the past nor abandoned it altogether,
and set itself apart from the overwhelming influence of the European painting
tradition. Yet it was precisely in this process of defining modern art that the traditional
arts were conflated with the past and that which the modern artist strived to
transcend.

Onobrakpeya’s artistic practice is distinct both stylistically and conceptually from

Uche Okeke’s, but under the premise of ‘natural synthesis’ multiple similarities can
be found in the way appropriations of adire serve to traditionalize and anonymize the
art form to the extent that much of its modernity is undermined. Onobrakpeya utilized
adire along with dozens of other forms derived from multiple ethnic backgrounds and
diverse literary, mythological, religious and artistic sources. Nevertheless, the two
artists’ appropriations of women’s cultural production warrant comparison because
together they shed a great deal of light on both how adire, uli, and potentially other
forms of visual culture, were reconceptualized as ‘traditional’ and help explain the
absence of women in Nigerian modern art.

Just as Okeke’s work and research did little to document the identities and lives of
the women who produced uli in its original form, Onobrakpeya does the same with
adire. Even where labor served as a leitmotif in his works, the female laborer or dyer
115
is absent. An etching from 1985 titled Obioko II, for example, portrays a boatman in
his vessel calling to the shores for customers to ferry across the river (figure 2.3).
This is one of many of Onobrakpeya’s prints that pay homage to the common man or
laborer. With his head held high and an oar poised across his body, the boatman’s
figure takes up the vast majority of the composition, leaving most of his boat, the
churning waters, and his customers ashore out of view. Instead, the man’s torso and
his garments hold the viewer’s attention. Extending from the man’s waist and flowing
over the edge of his narrow boat is the familiar pattern of an adire eleko cloth. The
fabric reveals itself from underneath the man’s tunic, and is given relatively
prominent attention in the image. With the integration of the cloth into the man’s
clothing the artist shifts from using the grid-pattern motif as decorative or space-filling
purposes as it did in Uli to using it as a conceptual device that elevates the status of
the subject. This shift suggests a new strategy that is contingent upon the artist’s
recognition of adire’s associations with the working class, and perhaps the cloth’s
relatively newer commemorative function.

Yet the relationship between labor and adire ends there. The image is not paying
homage to the labor of indigo dyeing. This is not because adire production was easy
work, on the contrary it was a laborious process that could take weeks or months to
complete a single cloth, but because in all of his prints and paintings that feature
workers—from boatmen to farmers, tailors to weavers, as well as dyers---the laborer
is always male. The uli print seems a rare exception to the rule, but the woman
holding the vial of uli dyes is so stylized she is hardly recognizable as a woman or an
uli artist. When Obioko II is compared to Onobrakpeya’s depictions of women from
“The Blue Motifs,” a series in which the artist captures his “fascination with the indigo
blue designs on the clothes worn by the women,” another difference becomes
apparent.175 The female subjects in “The Blue Motifs” are never actively engaged in
work or activity the same ways as his male subjects. Rather than adire being used
as a conceptual and graphic device as it is in Obioko II, adire is the subject of the
series, not an exploration of adire’s production but a mere observation of what
Yoruba women looked like during the artist’s travels to the region.

175
Singletary, Bruce Onobrakpeya, 137.
116
Despite his interest in depicting laborers, in Onobrakpeya’s work the women who
labor over the dye vats in the production of adire are noticeably absent. Instead,
women appear as passive consumers of adire rather than its politically and
economically influential producers. The difference is particularly pronounced when
“The Blue Motifs” series is compared to the “Zaria Indigo Series.” Within the latter
series, Onobrakpeya depicts men at work in the dye pits in Birni, the old walled city
of Zaria in Nigeria’s northern Islamic region.176 In these works, the male dyers are
seated on the ground with legs bent straddling the edge of the dye vat engaged in
the dipping of cloth into the dye. Their faces, bodies and garments are painted a
deep indigo hue in stark contrast to the orange earthen tones of their surroundings,
further solidifying the association between the northern region, the men, and the blue
cloth they produce (figure 2.4).

The images are reminiscent of documentary photographs from the dye pits in the
1960s around the time Onobrakpeya produced the series, suggesting that he visited
the dye pits in Birni and made sketches while on site. Based on the similarities to the
photographs, the paintings and prints seem to represent an accurate contemporary
portrayal of the ancient dye pits in the north where men are fully in charge of the
indigo dyeing process. However, the images only tell a small part of the regional
dyeing history. It was only in the early 20th century that dyeing in Hausa territory
became a strictly male domain. Previously, the center of the Hausa Kingdom at the
palace in Kano was sustained by a system of royal concubinage that relied on
hundreds of enslaved women and eunuchs for the production of indigo-dyed cloth.177
Some of these women were Yoruba who brought their knowledge of indigo dyeing to
the north as both free and forced laborers.178 A jihad in 1804 brought about
significant structural changes to the Kingdom that resulted in the formation of the
Sokoto Caliphate. Textile production expanded significantly under this large and
powerful Islamic polity. The vast reach of the Caliphate and the importance of textiles
in Islamic culture brought forth collaborations from multiple ethnic groups living

176
See Darah and Quel, Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Spirit in Ascent, 43.
177
For a full account of women’s role in indigo cloth production in Kano see: Heidi Nast,
Concubines and Power: Five Hundred Years in a Northern Nigerian Palace (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
178
Philip J. Shea, “Big Is Sometimes Best: The Sokoto Caliphate and Economic Advantages
of Size in the Textile Industry,” African Economic History 34 (2006): 12.; Kriger, Cloth in
West African History, 148.
117
together under its dominion.179 The Caliphate reigned for a century before it
succumbed to the British pacification campaign in 1903. It was at this time that the
dyeing industry became a strictly male domain, though Yoruba immigrants continued
to bring their knowledge from the dyeing centers in the south.

Like with uli’s image and history as it was portrayed through the work and research
of Okeke, the world of indigo dyeing through the lens of Onobrakpeya’s work is
schematized. The value of these Zaria artists’ own interpretations of women’s
cultural production, therefore, lies not in the research or attempts at preservation but
rather in their abilities to reinvent these forms for a new era of nationalism. However,
with regard to adire, this was not the first time that patterns were used for political
purposes. Onobrakpeya’s most effective use of appropriation as an artistic strategy
was not in the use of adire patterns as a motif in his drawings and paintings, as was
discussed in this section in the work Obioko II, but when he realizes the similarities
between textile patterning processes and printmaking, and begins to approach the
pattern as a storytelling device instead of a decorative element.

Politics into Patterns

Adire became directly implicated in politics by way of activism and anti-colonial forms
of dress, however, some patterns also indicate the effort by designers to keep in step
with changes in power. Specifically, adire designers picked up on the emerging trend
of commemorative portrait cloth with the creation of a new pattern in 1935 featuring
the King and Queen of England (figure 2.5). The adire oloba, meaning ‘cloth with a
king’, was created especially for the silver jubilee celebration of King George V and
Queen Mary, marking an increased involvement of adire in the political-visual
landscape. The pattern would prove to be immensely popular even as its invention
came at the time of the industry’s economic difficulty. The King George V cloth would
inspire a number of iterations of the oloba design that were adapted for new rulers
and new purposes over several decades, but consistently demonstrated an effort on
the part of its producers to respond to the influx of foreign material, the changing
political climate, and the shifting desires of their clientele. Like the Olokun, if not to a

179
Shea, “Big Is Sometimes Best: The Sokoto Caliphate and Economic Advantages of Size
in the Textile Industry,” 14.
118
greater degree, the oloba was integrated into the modern world in technical,
symbolic and utilitarian ways.

Composed of a central medallion shape that contains the portrait busts of the two
royals and surrounded by various plant, animal, human figures and royal emblems,
the oloba came to symbolize power through a unique synthesis of visual icons and
motifs. Even as its subjects changed, using an iconic design that allowed pattern
makers to swap out figures and names interchangeably, the cloth’s symbolic
meaning remained the same. Rather than a straightforward representation of
colonial or British power, however, the oloba contains numerous nuanced symbols of
power in the Yoruban vernacular. This is key to the pattern’s adaptability, both in
fulfilling its commemorative function and in its appropriation into art by Onobrakpeya.

Throughout the colony, the silver jubilee celebrations featured fireworks, bonfires,
speeches, live music and dances, and children’s street parades. The events
stretched over several weeks in May of 1935. Leading up to and during the jubilee,
images of the king and queen were disseminated throughout the visual landscape on
banners that decorated the streets, on mugs that were handed out as gifts to
schoolchildren, on commemorative stamps issued for the occasion and in local
English and Yoruba language newspapers (figure 2.6). These visual sources likely
provided reference material for the artists who drafted the central motif of the oloba
design, which appropriates the portrait busts, the medallion shape used in some
banners, and icons of British royalty.

The synthesis of icons of British visual culture combined with emblems of Yoruban
royalty and wealth suggest the intentions of the stencil-maker to reflect the political
atmosphere. Yet these political symbols account for only one part of the imagery that
makes up the pattern. Many oloba cloths also feature a human-headed winged
creature that has been identified as al-Buraq, the steed that carried Mohammed from
Mecca to Jerusalem.180 They may also show other human figures including riders on
horseback, hunters, female nudes, biblical and crowned figures, as well as a wide
array of animals including birds, elephants and horses in addition to flowers and

180
N. Stanfield and G. Jackson, Adirẹ Cloth in Nigeria: The Preparation and Dyeing of Indigo
Patterned Cloths among the Yoruba, ed. J.; Barbour and D.; Simmonds (Ibadan: Institute of
African Studies, University of Ibadan, 1971), 85, 87.
119
other vegetation. These, as well as the common occurrence of the cowrie shell and
a more rare appearance of the pineapple, are indicators of the vibrant cross-cultural
commerce that connected Nigerian markets to India, Southeast Asia, Europe and
North Africa. The circulation of imagery printed on textiles facilitated an exchange of
visual culture that influenced production in Nigeria, similar to the assimilation of
foreign imagery on the Olokun pattern.

The oloba pattern shows a clear stylistic and iconographical digression from the
stock of adire eleko patterning that preceded it. It also contains several motifs that
are not named among those that have been identified as common to adire eleko
cloths.181 Certainly the nature of stenciling, which produces an image by filling in
negative space leaving each individual part freestanding, partially explains the
appearance of the oloba cloth that distinguishes it from intricate hand-painted eleko
patterns such as the Olokun, even in the less common cases of some oloba cloths
that were made through a combination of stenciling and free-hand patterning (figure
2.5). Scholars believed that there might have been a jubilee cloth commissioned
from the United Africa Company (UAC) that would have been produced in the U.K.
for the West African market and potentially inspired the oloba’s invention, though
none was ever found.182 Thus, a better means of interpreting the oloba and its
unique blend of iconography may be found in Yoruba visual culture. Specifically, the
oloba retains some of the aesthetic values that are prefigured in Yoruba sculpture
and portrait photography.

Photography’s inception in West Africa dates to 1839. Portrait photography had

begun replacing the roles of figurative sculpture among the Yoruba by the 1930s and
likely much earlier.183 As analyses of early West African portrait photography have
shown, certain conventions were utilized in the posture and composure of the sitter
that set them apart from conventions of European portraiture. These differences can
be observed in the work of Nigerian photographer J.A. Green who took portraits of

181
For list and description of motifs see: Margaret Olugbemisola Areo and Razaq Olatunde
Rom Kalilu, “Origin of and Visual Semiotics in Yoruba Textile of Adire” Arts and Design
Studies Vol. 12, 2013 Pg. 27.
182
George Jackson, “The Devolution of the Jubilee Design,” in Adire Cloth in Nigeria, ed.
Jane Barbour and Doig Simmonds (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan,
1971), 83.
183
Stephen F. Sprague, “Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves,” African
Arts 12, no. 1 (November 1978): 52.
120
both Africans and Europeans out of his studio in Bonny in the eastern Niger Delta
region as early as 1894.184 A contrast can be seen between Green’s photographs of
Europeans, which are characterized by their informality, and those of Nigerians in
which “the Africans assume more formal, dignified, and symmetrical poses.” 185 Since
portrait photography at this early stage was only available to the few who could
afford it, Green’s portraits are often of Bonny’s elites and chiefs, which may explain
the desire for formality. Men, in particular, assume a frontally oriented position to the
camera and tend to sit with their knees and elbows splayed, garments spread to their
full width, and hands placed on the knees. This observation is consistent with
previous claims by Stephen Sprague and Nigel Barley that these conventions of
squared postures emphasized the sitters’ “dignified stateliness” while the inclusion of
the hands ensured the sitters’ “completeness.”186

By the time of the invention of the oloba pattern, these conventions for portraiture
were well established in photography. It is conceivable then that in the designing of
the oloba’s central portrait medallion that the image of the king and queen was
adapted according to the visual codes of Yoruba portraiture. For one, in both of the
oloba versions featured here (figures 2.5 and 2.7) and in many others, the two royals
are depicted in a squarely forward position, as opposed to the ¾ profile used in
many of the state issued portraits of the British royals, including those circulated in
the Yoruba language newspapers. Two, the designer has chosen to include more of
the body than is typically seen in European portrait busts, allowing for an elaboration
of the garments that cover the body. This is significant considering the importance of
displays of fabric and garments by Yoruba chiefs and kings as material expressions
of civic power.187 Lastly, in both versions the artist has portrayed King George’s
hands. In the oloba from the Diko compound the elbows are splayed in an
exaggerated fashion similar to the manner of many of the men in photographs.

184
Martha G. Anderson and Lisa L. Aronson, “Jonathan A. Green: An African Photographer
Hiding in Plain Sight,” African Arts 44, no. 3 (2011): 39.
185
Anderson and Aronson, 41.
186
Sprague, “Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves,” 54.; Anderson and
Aronson cite Nigel Barley, 1988 Foreheads of the Dead: An Anthropological Look at Kalabari
Screens. Washington DC: National Museum of African art, Smithsonian Institution, 43-44.
187
Ruth Watson, “Civil Disorder Is the Disease of Ibadan”: Chieftancy & Civic Culture in a
Yoruba City, West African Studies (Athens, Ohio; Oxford, UK: Ohio University Press; James
Currey, 2003), 150–51.
121
The Diko oloba cloth also illustrates the effort on the part of the designer or stencil
cutter to achieve a likeness to the king and queen. In the rendering of King George’s
face one can observe the close attention paid to the part in his hair and to the shape
of his moustache (Figure 2.7). Similar attention to detail has been paid to the
Queen’s crown, her earrings and necklace. A certain level of likeness has been
achieved as a result, testifying to the skill of the stencil maker, and suggesting that
the other aesthetic choices made that produced the semi-abstracted, stylized look
may indicate a desire on the part of the designer to achieve “mimesis at the
midpoint”, that is, like many Yoruba portraitists working in sculpture before him, to
locate the image “somewhere between complete abstraction and individual
likeness.”188 Likeness may have also been desirable for the makers of oloba
because factory portrait cloths were becoming increasingly popular, and their
designers typically copied portraits directly from portrait photographs that sought not
only to replicate the subject’s likeness, but the formalities of the portrait.

The designers of the oloba also opted to include a number of symbols to connote
power in the local vernacular. Chief among these symbols are the birds that appear
around the heads of the royals. In the Diko oloba one appears to be emerging from
King George’s head while another rests on the queen’s shoulder. In the British
Museum version two birds in flight are suspended between the two royals. The
inclusion and placement of the birds may be making reference to a specific Yoruba
idiom of royalty in two ways: first, the bird emerging from the King’s head recalls the
Yoruba beaded crown, a piece of regalia worn exclusively by Yoruba kings with
divine right to rule and distinguished by its conical shape and the appearance of
birds on the sides and the top.189 Second, according to Yoruban mythology, the first
king was aided by a large bird that helped him choose the location of his future
kingdom. Only descendants of the first king are able to reign over the Yoruba people.
Other sources suggest that upon creating the first female the Yoruban gods gifted
her with a bird, allowing her to counterbalance the power and advantages of men.
Birds also appear on medicinal and divination staffs throughout Yorubaland, though

188
This is a paraphrasing of R.F. Thompson’s interpretation of Yoruba sculpting from 1971.
See: Sprague, “Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves,” 54.
189
For more in depth description and images see: Robert Farris Thompson, “The Sign of the
Divine King: An Essay on Yoruba Bead-Embroidered Crowns with Veil and Bird
Decorations,” African Arts 3, no. 3 (Spring 1970): 8.
122
the meaning of the birds and the accounts of Yoruba origination in general differ
widely from region to region.190

The interpretation of the birds as symbols of Yoruba royalty is supported by the

appearance in some versions of the pattern of the word “OYO” above the portraits.
The word refers to the Oyo Empire of the Yoruba that was one of the largest and
most powerful states in West Africa at the time of its zenith in the 18th century, and
remained a competing regal entity throughout the colonial era. The letter “O” appears
to be composed of a cowrie shell that was formerly used as currency and also
appears as a motif on its own in other oloba cloths. Other symbols found on the
oloba such as equestrian figures, lions, elephants and men holding guns have been
interpreted as relating to leadership associations in Yoruba society.191

It is impossible to know for sure whether these inclusions signify a specific political
sentiment on the part of the oloba’s producers or consumers, but based on the
evolution of the oloba pattern following its invention in 1935, it is clear that its
producers were in step with transfers of national and regional power from one ruler
to the next over several decades. Moreover, the specific Yoruba idioms utilized in the
King George oloba patterns are retained in future iterations of the pattern where the
likeness of the person depicted is not, indicating a prioritization of Yoruba aesthetics
over European ones.

This transition is already discernable in the second generation oloba pattern for the
coronation of King George V’s successor, Edward the VIII. King George V died less
than a year after celebrating his Silver Jubilee. His eldest son Edward took the
throne in January of 1936 but he reigned only briefly until his abdication the following
December. During these months, an adire oloba cloth was made in anticipation of his
coronation ceremony, which ultimately never took place (figure 2.8). This rare cloth
shows that a King George V pattern was quickly adapted by simply substituting in
the new king’s name, spelled ‘King Ediwodu VIII,’ in place of George and Mary’s

190
Robert Farris Thompson, “The Sign of the Divine King: An Essay on Yoruba Bead-
Embroidered Crowns with Veil and Bird Decorations,” African Arts 3, no. 3 (1970): 16–17.
191
Pat Oyelola, “Picture and Pattern in Contemporary Batik and Adire,” in Ezumeezu:
Essays on Nigerian Art and Architecture / A Festschrift in Honour of Demas Nwoko, ed.
Chika Okeke-Agulu and Obiora Udechukwu (Glassboro, NJ: Goldline & Jacobs Publishing,
2012), 66.
123
names. The figures in this cloth are clearly derived from those featuring Edward’s
predecessors, evinced by the presence of pronounced facial hair on the king, despite
Edward VIII’s clean-shaven appearance, and the presence of a queen that Edward
VIII did not have during his brief reign. Edward VIII’s abdication meant that his
pattern was quickly discontinued and explains why it is much rarer to find. It also
suggests that the Edward VIII pattern gives a close approximation to what the oloba
pattern looked like in the mid 1930s, since it is unlikely this pattern would have been
reproduced once it was clear the coronation would never take place.

Despite the brevity of Edward VIII’s rule, the oloba pattern enjoyed continued
popularity well beyond the reign of the kings it portrayed, suggested by the fact that it
could still be found readily in markets during the 1960s and 70s (the time when many
foreigners purchased them and many ended up in museum collections). They can be
occasionally found in markets today, and according to one source in Abeokuta, the
oloba, as well as other classic patterns can be made to order, but they may take
several months to produce. What has ultimately enabled the oloba to outlive the
monarchs it commemorated is its adaptability for new occasions, while maintaining
continuity in appearance over time, a hallmark of adire eleko production whereby
patterning is taught by one generation to the next.192 Just as the original pattern was
adapted slightly to commemorate George V’s predecessor, further alterations were
made to portray Nigerian chiefs and heads of state following independence,
including a cloth for Yakubu Gowon whose military regime ruled from 1966 – 1975,
and the Alake of Abeokuta in 1970.193 These later manifestations borrow
iconography directly from the original pattern, including the crown motif, the seated
figure, and the name of the person depicted, which would otherwise not be
recognizable since a generic king figure is used in all of these cloths, a departure
from the clear dedication to likeness exhibited by the original George V pattern. This
new generic figure, combined with the composition of repeated medallions shapes

192
Hand-painting patterns is typically a skill handed down from mother to daughter, a custom
which has kept many of the original patterns in production for several generations. Stanfield
and Jackson, Adirẹ Cloth in Nigeria: The Preparation and Dyeing of Indigo Patterned Cloths
among the Yoruba, 53.
193
For images of these cloths, see: John Gillow, Printed and Dyed Textiles from Africa,
Fabric Folios (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001), 76.; C. Polakoff, African
Textiles and Dyeing Techniques (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 67.; Pat Oyelola, Nigerian
Artistry (Ibadan, Nigeria: Mosuro Publishers, 2010), 31.
124
that within it hold the most important elements of the pattern, serve, along with its
associations to the coronation and jubilees it formerly commemorated, to codify the
concept of a cloth which connotes and celebrates figures of authority. Put simply, it
did not matter who was depicted in the cloth, the oloba evoked strong associations of
kingship and power to those who understood its pattern language. From this point
forward, the British crown, specifically the St. Edward crown is strategically
appropriated and retained from the original oloba designs into the newer ones for
rulers of an independent Nigeria.

The extent to which a piece of cloth can impact politics is difficult to measure, but a
case study on civic culture and politics in early 20th century Ibadan (a Yoruba city
also known for its adire dyeing) reveals precisely the power a portrait cloth can have
and the political unrest it may instigate. In 1939, just four years after the release of
the adire oloba cloth, and three years after a colonial governor in Ibadan declared
that the local Olubadan title would be henceforth given official recognition, a cloth
surfaced in the markets of Ibadan that put a name and face in visual and material
form to that title. Concerned that the widespread sale of the cloth might incite political
disorder, the Ibadan Native Authority released a decree that effectively banned the
sale and use of the cloth. The royal blue damask featured a full standing portrait of
the Olubadan named Okunola Abasi (spelled elsewhere “Abass”) holding a leopard
on a leash and enclosed in the medallion shape typical of portrait cloths. Abasi is
dressed in striped robes and a turban, a depiction drawn by the designers of the
cloth directly, and quite accurately, from a photograph of him that circulated in
Nigerian newspapers during the time of his reign as Olubadan (1930 – 1946). It was
the inscription and decoration enclosed within the border around Abasi as it
appeared on the cloth, however, that caused the greatest concern to the colonial
authorities. As in the adire oloba, the image of the St. Edward crown sits at the top of
the medallion. The sides of the medallion and at the bottom read “OLUBADAN
D’OBA ABUSE BUSE” or “The Olubadan has become King, Everything is
Finished.”194 These two additions, which distinguished the cloth design from the

194
Ruth Watson, 'Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan': Chieftancy & Civic Culture in a
Yoruba City, West African Studies (Athens, Ohio; Oxford, UK: Ohio University Press; James
Currey, 2003) 145-150.
125
photograph, were enough to provoke the colonial authorities to ban the cloth outright
from sale or use from Ibadan to Lagos.

The Ibadan Patriotic Association (IPA) had ordered the cloth from a European
manufacturer. The IPA was motivated by an upcoming Conference of Yoruba Chiefs,
organized by the colonial administration, whereby, for the first time in history, all
Yoruba chiefs would gather under one roof under the guise of having a voice in
colonial governing. In the days leading up to the conference, a Yoruba leader, the
Alaafin brought the cloth to the attention of a colonial authority. The two men agreed
that the cloth must not be allowed at the conference and instituted a ban on its sale
and use effective immediately. Citing a risk of riots and violence, the order prohibited
anyone from exposing the cloth in public and offenders could be fined or imprisoned
or both. The portrait cloth, which was nearly identical to the portrait of the man it
featured that had circulated without conflict in local newspapers, contained the crown
emblem and an inscription that the authorities found to be particularly controversial.
By Yoruba custom, the Olubadan title was not in a position to be king. Within the
Oyo Empire hegemony, the chieftaincy of Ibadan, which included the Olubadan, was
subordinate to the Alaafin. By stating that the Olubadan title holder was now king,
the cloth disrupted not only the indigenous power structures, but undermined the
ultimate colonial authority: the British crown.

What authorities feared was not the cloth itself of course, but they feared that it
would be worn in large numbers by Ibadan residents to the Yoruba conference. Such
an act of turning the damask portrait cloth into a garment and wearing it in public
would amount to a blanket statement of allegiance to the Olubadan, not simply as
the local ruler, but as king.195 Since the cloth featured an easily recognizable figure
of Olubadan Abasi, with the addition of the crown the cloth made a clear statement
of who was king, regardless of whether or not one could read the inscription. At the
same time, the inscription and the transfer of the image onto cloth changed an
ordinary photograph into a subversive element of material culture. The fact that the
cloth was printed on damask and imported from Europe was not without its own
significance. Damask, as opposed to the basic cotton weave used, for example, in
the production of adire, is a densely woven cotton fabric with a satin-like finish. Along

195
Watson, 152–53.
126
with velvets, silks, and sateen, damask was imported from Europe by the wealthy
and worn exclusively by elites and chiefs as assertions of their political status and
power. For the general public of Ibadan to adorn themselves in damask, particularly
a damask dyed a royal blue, presented yet another potential upheaval of the
established hierarchy and power structure. Thus, the potential agency or danger
even of the cloth lay in the design, the material, and the capacity of the textile to be
disseminated in large numbers and worn as a political statement. This agency was
effectively undermined by the ban of its sale and use, highlighting the important role
of the body and the individual in the actualization of a textile’s symbolism and power.

The case highlights the communicative nature of the textile: it speaks without the
wearer having to open his or her mouth, it is a non-violent form of protest, and it is
difficult for authorities to prosecute the wearing of clothing when the meaning of the
cloth is not so obviously stated by its design. This was not the first time cloth was
used to assert power and authority among the Yoruba. Rather, this action derived its
very agency from a long established practice of communicating through fabric, and it
illustrates how a textile can celebrate and commemorate one minute, and in the next
minute be used to subvert or criticize.

Appropriating the Design and Symbolism of the Adire Oloba

Along with the Olokun, the oloba is the most frequently utilized adire pattern found in
Onobrakpeya’s works. As with the Olokun, Onobrakpeya adopts the easily
recognizable composition of the stenciled pattern to new configurations in prints and
paintings. According to Onobrakpeya, he returned again and again to the oloba
composition in his artwork because it was useful to him as a storytelling device. 196
Conceptually, this allowed for a sort of template that was both easily recognizable to
his audience and retained some of the associations the oloba held to power. The
template could then be filled and modified for the new composition. The ease with
which designers could alter the oloba design to accommodate new rulers, or new
desires of adire’s clients was transferrable to Onobrakpeya’s works.

Apart from the conceptual devices made available to the artist by adire’s pattern
language and its deep integration into the nation’s social and political fabric, adire

196
Bruce Onobrakpeya in conversation with the Erin Rice, April 18th 2014, Lagos, Nigeria
127
offered Onobrakpeya technical and stylistic possibilities that contributed significantly
to the evolution of his personal style as an artist. As Onobrakpeya has said himself,
he learned a great deal about the use of space by looking at adire designs and
applying what he learned to his printmaking.197 This is evident in his use of geometric
motifs to fill unused space, his all-over compositions, and the structure of several
works that take the oloba pattern as their compositional starting point. The
characteristic stylization and flatness typical of adire appealed to his technical
strengths. His draftsmanship, particularly drawing in the round and perspectival
space, was limited such that after the 1960s he abandons these modes of working
altogether.198 Instead, he came into his own when he emphasized flatness and the
stylized aesthetics embodied by the adire textile. Printmaking, his preferred mode of
working, is also similar in procedure to the printing of a textile, just as painting on a
canvas is not so far removed from the preparation of a painted eleko cloth.

The oloba also supplied an effective structure for the synthesis of multiple forms and
sources. This may account for its recurrence during the time when Onobrakpeya was
producing works with Christian themes. The lino engraving titled “Nativity II” from
1978 demonstrates how the oloba was utilized for Onobrakpeya’s non-political
purposes yet still served to orient the image by placing the powerful (Mary with baby
Jesus) at the center and the less-powerful three kings, herders, animals and angels
on the periphery (figure 2.9). The stylizations of these peripheral figures are very
similar to the original King George oloba decoration. He has even retained the band
of text that runs the length of the cloth at the bottom except that in the print it is no
longer words but markings that allude to words, a nod, he explains, to the often-
illiterate stencil cutters and designers responsible for making oloba patterns.199

What is remarkable about “Nativity II” is the manner in which Mary is portrayed in an
adire-like cloak with plaited hair. She is neither derived from the Europeans on the
original oloba, nor a European Christian depiction of Mary. Nor is she similar to the
other women depicted in Onobrakpeya’s works. Instead, he allows her garment and
her hair to become emblematic of her royalty, blending Christian and African forms in

197
Darah and Quel, Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Spirit in Ascent, 137.
198
jegede, Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, 109.
199
In conversation with Bruce Onobrakpeya in his studio, June 2012, Lagos, Nigeria.
128
such a way that Christianity no longer appeared to be a religion brought from the
West.

Adire appears as clothing in other adaptations of the oloba as well. An untitled

painting from 1969 which features three women together, seemingly engaged in
conversation with one another, utilizes the oloba pattern in a couple of ways. First,
the woman on the far right is dressed in an adire oloba wrapper, the central
medallion with newly stylized figures adorns her waist. The woman to her left wears
a pattern featuring a single figure flanked by geometric designs. The women are
wearing the cloth wrapped at their waists, over a blouse with short sleeves. They are
turned towards another woman who wears an indigo dress with tailored sleeves.
Both of these forms of dress indicate modernizations in the way the cloth was worn,
and the combination of a wrapper and blouse has been used as a form of resistance
to modes of European dress, by blending European and African styles.

Onobrakpeya produced a number of copies of this painting over the period of several
years. A serigraph print on paper produced one year later shows a nearly identical
configuration of women with the title “Have You Heard?” The new title alludes to the
rumored end of the Nigerian Civil War in 1970, and the three female figures appear
to be discussing it.200 Onobrakpeya utilizes the oloba as a point of reference to the
subject of national rule. By taking advantage of these associations with politics, he is
able to orient the meaning of the print without directly referencing political power in
the composition (figure 2.10).

On the Significance of a Signature

Among the three versions of the work "Have You Heard?" a pencil drawing, a
serigraph, and an oil painting, there is one significant difference.201 In the oil painting
of “Have You Heard” Onobrakpeya has added his name to the bottom edge of the
oloba cloth worn by the woman on the far right. He has strategically placed the name
where the oloba cloth usually features a band of text with a proverb or the name of
the compound where the cloth was produced. He also mimics the look of the
uppercase lettering used in the stenciled pattern. In the case of the Diko cloth, both

200
See Darah and Quel, Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Spirit in Ascent, 211; 221.
201
It is not clear how many versions of this composition Onobrakpeya produced. Three
found in the resources the artist commissioned himself are the ones referenced here.
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the name “Diko” and the proverb ise kosehin oluwa or “everything is known to God”
are included in the inscription. Thus, the inscription served as a signature and a way
of adding a message to the cloth that would be understood by those who could read
the Yoruba language. Onobrakpeya’s choice to put his name on the cloth was highly
unusual. Many of his works are unsigned within the printed area. Moreover, this is
not an actual signature but his name is part of the painting and placed in a way that it
becomes part of the cloth, and by extension, an inscription on the woman’s body.

The “ONOBRAKPEYA” inscription allows the artist to take authorship of the painting
and by extension, the adire pattern. Whether or not this was his intention, it is
significant because of the relevance of the signature both in the claiming of one’s
creative and intellectual property. The addition of a signature by craft practitioners
has been employed to combat anonymity, theft of designs, and to gain art world
acceptance and legitimacy.202 This strategy has been very effective in Australia for
Aboriginal artists who created batiks that were ascribed to communities rather than
individuals. In the case of adire, however, the situation is slightly different because
quite often adire artists sign their works. This is especially true for master
designers.203 It becomes a mark of their originality in a field where many adire artists
simply copy popular designs, and it allows them to demand more at the point of sale.
By integrating his name into the design, Onobrakpeya may also be referencing the
fact that stenciled adire designs were cut by men. It may also be interpreted as a
way in which the artist integrates himself into the historical trajectory of indigo
dyeing. Regardless of the interpretation of the addition of the artist’s name, it draws
attention to the transformative power of artistic appropriation.

"Have You Heard" reveals the accuracy of the term appropriation to describe the
process of using textile material and pattern language in art because other terms do
not recognize that act of taking ownership, regardless of whether the act is perceived
as a form of cultural theft or not. For example, John Picton has suggested that the
process by which Bruce Onobrakpeya works is better described as bricolage
following Lévi Strauss’s concept of the bricoleur as “someone who works with his

202
Sue Rowley, “Craft, Creativity and Critical Practice,” in Reinventing Textiles: Tradition &
Innovation, ed. Sue Rowley, vol. 1 (Winchester, England: Telos, 1999), 3.
203
See for example the ‘Lifting up the Beads (Sun Bébé)’ cloth in the Smithsonian collection
signed by its maker Madame Samuroh: Joan Kelly, ed., Adire: Resist-Dyed Cloths of the
Yoruba (Washington DC: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1997), 18.
130
hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman…” Strauss
explains further, “the ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse
tasks, but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the
availability of raw materials and tools…the rules of his game are always to make do
with ‘whatever is at hand’…By his craftsmanship he constructs a material object
which is also an object of knowledge.”204

Picton’s suggestion is useful in understanding much of the production of the Zaria

group in which diverse sources across ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries are
unified in the visual plane. However, the term lends too much credit to the artist in
giving significance to the material he appropriates. This is not an issue when
Onobrakpeya illustrates themes from Urhobo folklore into his own rendition because
this material belongs to the Urhobo people and a single person cannot claim its
ownership. It was, after all, one of the aims of the Zaria Art Society to mine
indigenous culture and rescue it from oblivion. Nor is the term bricolage inaccurate
when Onobrakpeya uses found objects such as old circuit boards. The boards no
longer serve their original purpose, and can therefore be re-purposed by the artist.
But Onobrakpeya’s appropriation of a repertoire of adire cloths was contingent on
the patterns’ capacity for synthesizing a broad range of visual sources in a singular
design that communicated in a local vernacular. Thus, Onobrakpeya’s use of adire
patterning is very different from his use of folklore or the found object in its attempt to
“rescue” culture that was not necessarily in need of rescue and to modernize a form
of cultural production that was already modern.

More importantly, the patterns adopted by Onobrakpeya were already highly

symbolic and part of a visual form of communication facilitated by the cloth and by its
wearing on the body. Adire, like many factory printed and Dutch wax cloths, has a
designer, a number of influences (both local and foreign) on its appearance, and it
has a history that carries meaning within it. The pattern's symbolism, though
constantly evolving, already exists, and it is part of what is appropriated when its
patterns are used in art. Therefore, the term appropriation is applicable to the
processes of Onobrakpeya and other artists working with the textile’s forms and

204
Picton quoting Lévi Strauss in John Picton, “Fetishising Modernity: Bricolage Revisited,”
in Art History and Fetishism Abroad: Global Shiftings in Media and Methods, ed. Gabriele
Genge and Angela Stercken (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2014), 215.
131
material. It recognizes that what was borrowed came from someone or somewhere
else. By contrast, the position of Picton, as well as the interpretations of Zaria's
artistic output by Oguibe and Okeke-Agulu, all place emphasis on the artist in the
creation of meaning, and thereby locate the agency associated with modernity and
political resistance within the modernist artistic process, inadvertently removing it
from cultural producers such as textile artists, from whom artists like Onobrakpeya
have derived a great deal of material.

Adire Appropriation beyond Zaria

The artistic procedures of appropriation and synthesis were not limited to the Zaria
Art Society. The Mbari Mbayo club emerged in the 1960s in the Yoruba town of
Oshogbo and several of its early members went on to be influential Nigerian artists.
The club was formed through the collective efforts and desires of Duro Ladipo, a
young Nigerian playwright, and Ulli Beier, a European who would come to play a
large role in the development of Nigerian visual and literary arts. Within the
transdisciplinary productions of the Mbari Mbayo Club, textiles and dress were
integral to the formation of aesthetics unique to what would eventually be called the
Oshogbo Group, combining theater with music, literature, and visual arts.

On the event of the club’s inauguration in 1962, Duro Ladipo starred as the king in a
production of his own play, Oba Moro. Hanging behind him and fellow actor Tijiani
Mayakiri was a large Olokun cloth that served as the backdrop to the play (figure
2.11). Easily identifiable by the “OK” motif frequently found in Olokun patterns, the
textile accentuated the “Yorubanness” of a Yoruba-language play, about a Yoruba
king within the once indomitable Yoruban Oyo Kingdom, effectively and literally
‘setting the stage’ for the integral role batik would come to play in the Oshogbo
school. The artist Susanne Wenger, who was married to Beier at the time, also
participated in the opening with an exhibition of linocuts and batiks, establishing
another initial link between Mbari Mbayo, Oshogbo, and the art of textiles. 205

In the context of Oshogbo where indigenous religion was practiced locally in the
sacred Osun Groves the Olokun has particular relevance because of its connection

205
Peter Probst, Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011), 40.
132
to the Yoruban pantheon. Oshogbo would become home to a major center for batik
under the care and tutelage of Wenger, who would take it upon herself to revive the
Osun grove and the Yoruba religion against the ravages of colonialism and
Christianity. Olokun’s patchwork of motifs stands as reminder of its own modernity,
carefully composed by women artists who were actively acculturating and
synthesizing foreign visual culture in their own pattern language. Yet, the selection of
the Olokun pattern subtly positions the production of Oba Moro within a modernist
framework at the same time that it places women’s work in the literal and figurative
background to a male lead.

The use of adire as a backdrop to a play also signals a new function for the textile as
a decorative wall hanging. Though this is likely not the first time adire was used in
this way, it is symbolic of what it would become under the Oshogbo school.
Arguably, the simple transition of adire from the body to the wall is as great a leap
towards a “modernist” aesthetic as achieved by Onobrakpeya and other artists that
came out of Zaria. Oshogbo also offered opportunities to men who were interested in
practicing adire eleko and experimenting with the art form as a means of expression.
Though they were not without opposition, male artists such as Ademola Onibon-
Okuta persevered by taking up an apprenticeship with a senior adire specialist.
Others like Sangodare Gbadegesin studied batik under Wenger.206

Among the visual artists that participated in Mbari Mbayo’s gatherings and
workshops were several artists who practiced batik and pushed its technical and
visual boundaries. A prominent artist in the group named Twins Seven Seven had
brought his new wife, Nike Okundaye, to live with him in Oshogbo. Seven Seven
taught her how to draw, but being in Oshogbo offered Okundaye the opportunity to
return to the art of adire she had learned from her great grandmother. This led to her
discovery of the wax-resist (batik) method and allowed her to establish her own
career apart from her husband’s influence. Okundaye expanded her skills as a dyer
and began breaking down the barriers between Yoruban textiles and modernist art
forms, adapting adire patterns to paper and canvas.

206
Oyelola, “Picture and Pattern in Contemporary Batik and Adire,” 69.
133
As her artistic style has evolved in the decades since Oshogbo, Okundaye has
translated the batik and adire forms into pen and ink drawings and acrylic paintings
on canvas. The Olokun and other eleko patterns feature prominently in many of
these later works. Often composed of two image layers that include adire eleko
patterns laid out in the familiar grid structure the scenes that emerge range from rural
landscapes, market scenes, and images of women going about daily activities. The
interplay between foreground and background is minimal. On rare occasion the
patterning is allowed to bleed through the foreground scene to appear as the
patterning on a woman’s wrapper. In general, the patterning is treated with great
precision and detail and is given priority over the secondary image, which is
sometimes painted so faintly and in loose, expressionistic strokes that it is nearly
subsumed by the patterning as it is for example in The Levees of My Inspiration
(1990). Compositionally, the two subjects remain distinct layers, but conceptually it is
made clear through the sustained repetition of patterns and themes over many years
that adire is integral to the lives of Yoruba women, a notion at the core of
Okundaye’s artistic practice.

Each of these paintings contributes to a body of work that has become a visual
repository of adire eleko patterns. The squares of patterns are hand-painted on to
canvas as they would be hand-painted in cassava paste onto cotton prior to being
dipped in an indigo dye bath. Among dozens of geometric motifs in the paintings,
several figural and architectural motifs emerge that identify with specific adire cloths,
which make the paintings that Okundaye paints in an indigo-like hue visually very
similar to an adire cloth.

According to Okundaye, this process of directly copying adire patterning is a strategy

of preservation. She explains that the patterns were used as a form of non-verbal
communication between women, and to reproduce them in paintings is a way for
people to remember the patterns.207 Women painted the patterns onto the fabric to
express what they were feeling, experiencing or wishing for in the moment. 208 At
times, patterns could contain double meanings that were only understood by the

207
Nike Okundaye, Artist talk at Gallery of African Art (GAFRA), London, October 11, 2014.
208
Christian Purefoy, “Nigeria’s ‘Mama Nike’ Empowers Women through Art,” African Voices
(CNN, April 12, 2011),
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/04/12/nigeria.nike.davies.okundaye/.
134
women who produced and wore the cloth. For decades, this has meant that some of
the interpretations that have been repeatedly published by foreign scholars have
only been partial. There was always an explanation for each motif readily supplied
for an inquiring visitor, but the second meaning known only to those who “spoke” the
pattern language of adire remained hidden. Okundaye and her daughter Allyson
Davies revealed the central motif of the Olokun cloth, believed to be depicting a four-
legged stool, alternatively to be representing a tray with four spoons, understood by
local women as an allusion to female genitalia with the message “only a woman
knows who the father of her child is.”209 This local meaning adds further credence to
the connection of the pattern to a goddess associated with fertility.

While such alternative interpretations of the patterns could go a long way in shedding
light on the origins and evolutions of adire eleko, these revelations are limited to
Okundaye’s public talks, teaching, and her daughter’s publication (Davies,
Storytelling Through Àdìre, 2014). Her modernist work, on the other hand, falls into a
similar preservationist, traditionalizing purview of the ‘synthesis’ experiment.
Okundaye borrows from a limited variety of adire's geometric patterning. She uses
the same abstract, geometric motifs again and again, leaving out most of the figural
icons found on the fabric. Similar to Uche Okeke’s promotion of a limited range of uli
that represented only a small fraction of Igbo visual culture, Okundaye’s modernist
artworks present a simplified lexicon of adire motifs. The meaning of the patterns,
assuming this is part of what is meant to be preserved, may actually be lost in its
inclusion in a painting.

The accompanying imagery in Levees as in many paintings of the same time period
and genre by Okundaye relates to only vague and conventional expressions of
womanhood in rural Nigeria. It does not appear to have anything to do with adire, its
production or its meaning, creating a similar disconnect between subject and object
demonstrated by Onobrakpeya’s Obioko II. Rather, the combination with a rural

209
Jane Barbour identifies the motif as most probably a stool but says other informants gave
other interpretations. Jane Barbour, “The Origin of Some Adire Designs,” in Adire Cloth in
Nigeria: The Preparation and Dyeing of Indigo Patterned Cloths among the Yoruba, ed. Jane
Barbour and Doig Simmonds (Ibadan, Nigeria: University of Ibadan, 1971), 49–80.; Nike
Okundaye in conversation with Allyson Davies, Artist Talk at Gallery of African Art (Gaafra),
London October 11, 2014. See also: Allyson Davies, Storytelling Through Àdìre (Allyson
Davies, 2014).
135
scene denies the Olokun of its origins in the port city of Lagos, and makes no
references to the Yoruba pantheon to which the Olokun also relates. The paintings
remove the patterns from the vital context where they are produced, consumed and
retain meaning thereby falling short of their preservationist aims. If Okundaye paints
the patterns because historically people have used them to speak with one another,
and by recording them in a painting they can be remembered, then the question
remains how are the paintings better preservers of adire’s pattern language than
adire itself?210 One could even argue that the textile is still far more accessible to
people than her painting, which was on sale in Okundaye’s Lagos-based gallery for
10,500 USD in 2016.211 A new adire eleko cloth, by contrast, costs between 20-30
USD.

Unlike uli, which is a fragile, ephemeral art on the body, and one that is not easily
preserved when it is found on the wall of someone’s home, a textile can be saved for
a long time. Adire textiles are still in rather large supply: not only are they preserved
in museum collections around the world, but they can be found in private collections
in Nigeria and abroad, as well as purchased in Nigerian markets or adire “factories.”
Old patterns such as the elaborate adire oniko can be commissioned from those
capable of making them. In Oshogbo and her hometown of Ogidi, most of this
existing industry can be directly credited to Okundaye herself, meaning that her long-
term efforts in training women in adire and batik production have paid off in terms of
maintaining the production of indigo dyeing in Yorubaland. However, although adire
dyeing persists thanks to Okundaye’s efforts, it appears limited to the spaces of her
art centers and it is reliant on financial subsidization from Okundaye or sales to
tourists drawn to her workshops by Okundaye’s reputation as an artist.212 This hardly
qualifies as a continuation of the vibrant industry that adire once was. It is far more
reminiscent of the experimental fusion of adire, batik and art that took place in
Oshogbo in the 1970s.

210
Artist talk, Nike Okundaye at Gallery of African Art, London, October 11, 2014.
211
http://www.nikeart.com/shop.php Accessed 19.08.2016
212
This observation is based on my visits to Oshogbo and Ogidi where, in both cases, there
was a lot of pressure to purchase items from the gift shop to support the workshops, and in
the case of Ogidi, the only time anyone was producing textiles seemed to be when we (the
visitors) were on the grounds, otherwise the lights were off.
136
Arguably, Nike Okundaye is adire’s greatest champion when she appears in public
wearing indigo blue from head to toe in her oversized gele and flowing adire kaftans.
Her amiable, welcoming, and outgoing personality draws the attention of visitors to
Nigeria, the international media (from CNN to The Guardian), and Nigerian
celebrities and elites. Once inside her gallery in Lagos and in her presence it is
impossible to not take notice of the cloth, its patterns and the artworks that adopt
them. Visitors are often offered the opportunity to dress in adire and wear beaded
necklaces and headdresses typically reserved for special occasions or royalty.
Following the trajectory of Okundaye’s life and career proves that adire has survived
by way of change and adaptation, rather than preservationist efforts.

The notion that the indigo dyeing practice was in a state of slowly dying out and
being lost was not merely a sentiment expressed by artists but was echoed in much
of the scholarship written on adire since the 1970s. One of the earliest publications
on adire, edited by Jane Barbour and Doig Simmonds in 1971, states in the
introduction that an entire section of the book “stemmed from a desire to save the
adire patterns for posterity.” Writing about two female batik artists emerging from the
Oshogbo art scene in the early 1970s, Jean Kennedy ascribes the work of Senabu
Oloyede and Kikelomo Oladepo to the influences of their artist fathers, who both
worked in sculpture. She downplays the obvious connections between the work of
Oloyede and Oladepo and adire by citing spurious differences between two forms of
batik art. “…Both [Oloyede and Oladepo] make use of a traditional medium, adire
eleko, their work is free and unprescribed. They may derive some inspiration from
traditional themes and carry over certain influences, however, the final results are
not traditional.”213

Presumptive conclusions about adire’s impending death based on decline in the

industry on the part of both scholars and artists have contributed to the erasure of its
modernity. Adire was not always conceived of as “traditional” or “indigenous.” It was
only much later that the cloth would come to be called “a traditional Yoruba women’s
wrapper.”214 Rather, the labeling of adire served a specific purpose: The
appropriations of adire eleko cloths like the Olokun into modernist art allowed the

213
Jean Kennedy, “New Heirs to Talent in Oshogbo: Senabu Oloyede, Kikelomo Oladepo,”
African Arts 4, no. 4 (Summer 1971): 24.
214
Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 155.
137
artists to evoke notions of tradition and the past. Even as these associations were
inaccurately applied and the forecast of adire’s future was pessimistic, the production
and modernization of adire continued into the 21st century, but the urge to conflate
adire with nostalgia for Nigeria's past was felt by scholars and artists alike.

Preservation and Indigenization from Schools to Workshops

In order to understand both the tendency to frame adire as “traditional’ culture and
preserve it through appropriation into modernist art, it is important to trace the
impetus towards using indigenous “traditional” art as a source of inspiration for the
modern African artist. Although the Zaria Art Society members were explicit about
their concerned with the overbearing influence of the West on their arts education,
they were neither the first nor the last to voice this sentiment. Around the same time
as the formation of the society, Nigeria’s ministers of education were seeking to
integrate a curriculum that drew equally from tradition and modernity in the arts after
a long-standing debate over the nature of Nigeria’s arts curriculum as articulated by
two men: Chief Aina Onabolu and Kenneth Murray.

Onabolu studied art in London and Paris then returned to Lagos in 1923 with
intentions of introducing Western artistic notions of perspective, proportions and
media such as painting on canvas to the secondary school system. He also
convinced the administration to recruit teachers from the UK who could assist with
instituting the new arts curriculum. One of those teachers was Kenneth Murray, who
would disagree with Onabolu’s sweeping embrace of a foreign system of arts
education, and would instead push for the reintegration of traditional arts and crafts.
Ultimately, despite the development of these two schools of thought, the secondary
school curriculum was unified under the Cambridge University School Leaving
Certificate Examination, the British rubric upon which all Nigerian curricula were
based. This system remained largely unchanged from the late 1930s to the time of
independence, prompting Ulli Beier to declare in 1960 that, “art teaching suffered the
same failing that the whole of Nigerian education suffered. It is too foreign
oriented.”215

215
Chidum Onuchukwu, “Art Education in Nigeria,” Art Education 47, no. 1 (January 1994):
57.
138
Concerns for the state of African art also came from abroad. In a controversial essay
titled, “Return to Origins,” Frank McEwan, who at the time of publication in 1968 was
the director of the National Gallery of Art in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), forcefully
argued that a century of interference by foreign explorers, missionaries and
colonizers had dispossessed Africa of its “creative essence.” According to McEwan,
while those in the rural areas of East Africa squandered their creative talents making
trinkets for the tourist industry, African students ensnared within the Western
educational system were far worse off, for their indoctrination had resulted in a near
continent-wide destruction of authenticity in African art.

McEwan proposed the art workshop as a viable alternative to the art school.
Opposed to the rigidity of the university curriculum that ‘destroys art from the
moment of its birth,’ McEwan conceived of a workshop that was loosely structured,
allowing the artist to come and go as he or she pleased and work when creativity
struck.216 More importantly, given the proper support and protection McEwan
envisioned an environment where the artist could rediscover and revive African
expressive culture, not to ape tradition, but to tap a deep well of inspiration that could
revive the creative spirit and counter the influence of the West.

McEwan was not alone in this vision. In Nigeria, a young missionary named Kevin
Carroll with the Society of African Missions from Ireland recruited dozens of
sculptors, bead workers, textile artists and carvers to form the Oye-Ekiti Workshop in
1947. The intent of the Oye-Ekiti workshop was threefold: to develop a Yorubanized
Christian art genre for use in the churches of Southwest Nigeria, to preserve and
promote the local arts by encouraging artisans to synthesize Yoruba forms and
styles with Christian iconography, and to stage a modernist resistance to the
imposition of European religious imagery.217

216
Frank McEwan, “Return to Origins: New Directions for African Arts,” African Arts 1, no. 2
(Winter 1968): 88.
217
The church played a large role in the early stages of decolonization. Carroll also
encouraged his participants in the workshop to continue working with their traditional patrons
and fulfilling their commissions so that they would not lose their original source of inspiration
and financial income. He encouraged participation in the workshop regardless of the
person’s religion. See: Nicholas J. Bridger, “Oye-Ekiti Workshop: Creating African Christian
Art in Nigeria,” Material Religion 5, no. 1 (March 2009): 108.
139
Among several of Kevin Carroll’s participants, many of whom had illustrious art
careers including the sculptor Lamidi Fakeye, was the young Bruce Onobrakpeya
who joined in 1967, five years after his graduation from the university at Zaria.
Carroll commissioned Onobrakpeya to paint the Stations of the Cross for St. Paul’s
Church in Lagos, marking the first of many collaborations between the two men.
Onobrakpeya attributes much of his own success as an artist to Carroll’s patronage
during these formative years of his career.218 It may have also inspired him to
integrate Yoruba textile design into his work.

Adire features heavily in Onobrakpeya’s depictions of the scenes of Christ’s

crucifixion and death, particularly where Veronica is shown offering a shawl to wipe
Christ’s face. Set against a background of a leaf motif commonly found on adire
eleko, Christ, burdened by the weight of his cross which is also adorned in adire-like
patterning, reaches out to take the cloth from Veronica who is dressed in an adire
gele and wrapper. Still relatively unfamiliar with the sartorial culture of the Yoruba,
the commission for St. Paul’s offered Onobrakpeya the opportunity to experiment in
blending imagery, icons and styles within a Christian framework, creating within this
time dozens of works in the Christian theme including the aforementioned "Nativity
II." Specifically, Carroll’s commissions came with the objective of manifesting a
“Yorubanized” Christian imagery, an aim that could be realized through the
application of synthesis.

Although the mid-1960s were the years he spent travelling to Yoruba towns and
observing the culture and way of life, he was also exposed to the type of work that
was created within the Oye-Ekiti workshop under Carroll’s tutelage. In all likelihood,
Onobrakpeya would have seen works such as the Nativity crèche carved by the
young artist named Bandele. The carver experimented with a merging of Yoruba
forms with the Christian story. Alongside Carroll and a few other local artists,
Bandele produced a crèche that was sent to Rome as an example of Christian art in
the Yoruban context and vernacular.219 The result combined woodwork, beads,
textiles, embroidery and weaving in the creation of six figures: Joseph, Mary, baby
Jesus, and the three kings. Although Joseph and Mary appear fair-skinned and

218
Nicholas J. Bridger, Africanizing Christian Art: Kevin Carroll and Yoruba Christian Art in
Nigeria (Cork, Ireland: Society of African Missions, Irish Province, 2012), 91–93.
219
Bridger, “Oye-Ekiti Workshop: Creating African Christian Art in Nigeria,” 109.
140
clothed in plain tunics, the three kings are dark-skinned and adorned in the
accoutrements of West African royalty. While certain items identify the kings directly
with Yoruba kingship and Ifa divination, such as the beaded crown and the divination
bowl, they also wear robes made of kente cloth. While their garments are Asante
rather than Yoruban, they nevertheless symbolize royalty in the West African
context, and serve to fulfill the objective of the workshop by displaying a coexistence
of European with Yoruban artistic styles, and Christianity with indigenous religion.220
What appears crucial to the appropriation of Yoruba textiles in the context of
Christian art is that the textiles present a means of inclusion of indigenous forms of
religion and authority in a manner that is non-threatening to the European Christian
audience.

The visions of Carroll and McEwan were hardly identical but they had all the
trappings of European patronage familiar across Africa in the late colonial period, the
type of involvement criticized by V.Y. Mudimbe in The Idea of Africa that aimed at
rescuing indigenous art from foreign influence but that ultimately reproduced a great
deal of the problematic dynamics of teacher and student, patron and artist that the
workshop intended to supplant.221 Even Onobrakpeya, who is quick to extol Carroll,
has criticized McEwan’s assertion that African culture has been broken down by
calling it a “typical neo-colonial” lamentation about Africa.222 Kenneth Murray’s
initiatives have been criticized as well. Both Oguibe (2002) and Okeke-Agulu (2015)
contend that Aina Onabolu’s encouragement of students to experiment with new
forms and techniques was more aligned with the Nigerian modernist experience than
Murray was, a position that contradicts prevailing views of the development of early
artistic Modernism that typically viewed Murray’s position as pro-Nigerian. Murray
zealously promoted a preservation of culture, introducing a discourse of authenticity
that served to both undermine Onabolu’s work and create a prescriptive model of
production that was replicated elsewhere in Africa.223

220
Bridger, 109.
221
Mudimbe compared both McEwan and Carroll’s efforts to Pierre Romain-Desfossés’
project in Lubumbashi, D.R.C. (formerly Elisabethville) to “awaken in his students this
ancient, aesthetic memory” that had been abolished by the interference of white men.
Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, 160–61.
222
Safy Quel, ed., Bruce Onobrakpeya: Symbols of Ancestral Groves (Lagos, Nigeria:
Ovuomaroro Gallery, 1985), 25.
223
Oguibe, “Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African Art,” 249.
141
Notions of authenticity rooted in African culture echoed across the political spectrum
as well. Freshly independent nations looked to the past in the making of a new,
modern, national identity. Charismatic leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and
Leopold Senghor encouraged all Africans to embrace their culture and history with
pride, a mission Nkrumah translated into dress by wearing kente cloths almost
exclusively. Pan-African events, such as FESTAC hosted by Nigeria in 1977 put the
continent’s cultural heritage on display on an international stage. For Onobrakpeya,
who took part in FESTAC ’77, the event was a huge source of pride for him and his
fellow Nigerian artists, and it encouraged a continuation of the spirit of synthesis to
“take the best from our culture and the best from outside and move on from there.”224
For others, the experience of FESTAC, and more specifically its repercussions in the
decades after it, has had a hampering effect on innovation in Nigerian aesthetics.
Professor Denis Ekpo, for example, argues that for many Nigerians “the concept of
culture is trapped in the FESTAC spirit” and as a result art has served as the
handmaiden to the preservation of culture.225

To a large extent, the influences of foreign workshops and their figureheads shaped
an entire generation of artists by emphasizing the importance of African identity.
Curator Simon Njami identifies this generation as the first of three stages of
metamorphosis for the African artist. Artists in the first stage exhibited an extreme
celebration of African roots that corresponds with the period immediately following
independence. Specifically, artists took pride in exhibiting their “Africanness” in the
form of visual arts.226 The resulting work, exemplified by the Nsukka and Zaria
artists, has been described as an “ethnoaesthetics” and is attributed to the politics of
the postcolonial state.227

224
Bruce Onobrakpeya on the benefits of FESTAC ’77 speaking during a roundtable
discussion at “Across the Board, Interdisciplinary Practices: FESTAC ‘77” Hosted by Tate
Modern at Terra Kulture, Lagos, Nigeria Friday 18th April 2014
225
Denis Ekpo in a roundtable discussion at “Across the Board, Interdisciplinary Practices:
FESTAC ‘77” Hosted by Tate Modern at Terra Kulture, Lagos, Nigeria Friday 18th April 2014
226
Simon Njami, “Chaos and Metamorphosis,” in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a
Continent (Düsseldorf, Germany: Museum Kunst Palast; Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007), 20.
227
Moyo Okediji, “Ona and Uli: Ethnoaesthetics and Postcoloniality in African Art,” in The
Nsukka Artists and Contemporary Art, ed. Simon Ottenberg (Washington DC: National
Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2002), 205.
142
There appears to be a contradiction between the critical reception of the “return to
origins,” to borrow McEwan’s phrase, when it is advocated by a European or when it
is practiced by an African artist. Oguibe posits that the Zaria Art Society’s means of
appropriation did not constitute the same problematic turn to the indigenous and
traditional as markers of authenticity as Murray, and Okeke-Agulu defends the
originality of the Zaria group in their individual approaches to synthesis and tradition.
Only Ulli Beier recognized it: “there are more and more young Africans who join the
expatriates in crying: We must preserve our traditional arts. This clamoring for the
'preservation' of African art shows how much the younger generation is out of touch.
It assumes that traditional cultures are in fact dead, that one is dealing merely with
art objects, as if they were archaeological discoveries, and not with living people who
are still, all over the country, using these objects in sacred ritual.”228

Beier goes on to discuss the dilemma posed in the preservation of objects. When an
official of the Nigerian Antiquities Service sees a “traditional” object in use in a village
and he purchases it and places it in a museum, he succeeds in preserving the
object. However, in doing so he becomes complicit in the destruction of the culture in
which the object served a function, and the object becomes useless and museal. If
he sees the “traditional” object and leaves it where he found it, it will continue to be
used by the culture, but risks succumbing to some form of destruction. In other
words, to attempt to preserve something that is still alive may actually produce the
inverse effect. His cautionary tale applies to the modern artist, who in mining his or
her indigenous culture for objects or forms becomes the archaeologist or
ethnographer of that culture which implicitly places the “modern” artist in a position of
power relative to the “traditional” artist.

The gender implications of this hierarchy cannot be ignored when the vast majority of
the “modern” artists were male. While scholars have addressed the gender
discrepancy in Nigeria they have done so by attempting to justify female absence or
attempting more inclusive attempts of historiography. Okeke-Agulu, for his part,
inserted the work of Colette Omogbai into his text Postcolonial Modernism and
explains that her expressionist work and her rejection of received aesthetic traditions

228
Ulli Beier, Art in Nigeria 1960 (London; New York; Ibadan: Cambridge University Press,
1960), 6.
143
were opposed by older artists, which is the reason her acceptance into the Lagos art
scene was hard won.229 Even while Omogbai’s stance towards the Western
influence in Nigeria’s art education and her aesthetic and theoretical questioning of
established artistic criteria aligned her in many ways with her Zaria contemporaries,
she was challenged on the basis that she had not shown mastery of representational
draftsmanship and her work did not “look feminine.” By contrast, Onobrakpeya also
struggled with representational draftsmanship and drawing in the round, favoring a
flattened plane and expressionistic style, for this he has been hailed a ‘creative
genius.’ Oguibe has argued the issue lies in the fact that women’s artwork did not
differ enough from their male counterparts. In particular, their representations of
women looked exactly like those produced by male artists, which is to say that they
were essentialized images of women in the limited roles of dancers, market women,
and mothers.230 This is indeed true, but rather than account for the lack of women in
the arts it shifts the blame onto women for their own absence, and fails to engage
critically with the representation of women in male artistic production.

The historical work of retrieval is only worthwhile if it serves to unpack and disrupt
the meta-narrative or canon that created the center-periphery paradigm to begin
with. This need not be an assault on the male practitioners but rather a critical
analysis of how a European patriarchal system was adopted and “synthesized” along
with its aesthetic conventions. In the specific case of Nigerian art, none of the
scholarly accounts address the problematic conflation of tradition and indigenous
culture with women within those paradigms of synthesis, even as these practices
have effectively edged women out of the framework of modernity while claiming to
be inclusive of them.

This chapter has looked to the past in an attempt to identify the junctures and shifts
that created what many comfortably refer to as the genre of Modern art in Nigeria.
Defined loosely by the politics of post-colonialism, nationalism and the variety of
artistic styles that were spurred by notions of synthesis, Modernism in the context of

229
Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism : Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century
Nigeria, 256.
230
See: Olu Oguibe, “Beyond Visual Pleasures: A Brief Reflection on the Work of
Contemporary African Women Artists,” in Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary
Africana Women Artists, ed. Salah M. Hassan (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1997), 63–
72.
144
Nigerian art proved to have a difficult relationship with tradition and indigenous
culture, much as it has had in the West. Equally so, artistic Modernism in both parts
of the world had a conflicted relationship with gender, undermining women’s artistic
and cultural production through its terms and practices of inclusion and exclusion.
Writing women out of the nation’s Modern art history was the work of colonial
authorities, artists, curators and historians, Nigerians and foreigners alike.

Taking the adire cloth as both its lens and subject this chapter questioned the tenets
of Modern art, particularly as those tenets hinged on its difference from tradition.
Adire, in the methods of its production and its expressive function in Nigerian dress,
proved to complicate that difference through its own modernization and
contemporaneity. The next chapter looks at the ways that adire evolved past Zaria,
Oshogbo, and past its own modern era. In a demonstration of adire’s continued
evolution, the developments that shaped adire’s image and function in the second
half of the 20th century and into the 21st will be explored as adire’s patterns and
history inspire new generations of artists and designers. In ways that depart
drastically from the generation that came of age in the 60s and 70s, adire will
continue to be adopted into art, fashion, and digitally printed textiles, especially
through the ever-expanding social-sartorial practice called aso-ebi.

145
 CHAPTER THREE
Transcending “Tradition”: Making and invoking memory through dress,
design, and art in contemporary Nigeria

This chapter introduces and analyses several social phenomena related to dress that
have surfaced in contemporary art practice. It argues that the younger generations of
artists, designers, and other cultural actors born after the shift to independence are
freed from the conceptual constraints related to nationalism, colonialism and tradition
that weighed heavily upon the shoulders of the older artists discussed in the previous
chapter. Influenced by globalization, both its benefits and its threats, these artists
that came of age in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s, explore themes of international
relevance in an indigenous and local vernacular. Their work critically invokes and
pays homage to the past without being hampered by tradition. The chapter begins
with the practice of aso-ebi, or “cloth of kin” which is the wearing of uniforms made of
the same cloth by families or other groups, and proceeds to explore interrelated
events, practices, and trends including the popularity of commemorative and portrait
cloth, the rise and decline of the Nigerian factory textile, the flood of legal and illegal
Chinese products onto the textile market, the recurrence of textiles in portrait
photography, and finally, the overlapping of contemporary fashion design with
contemporary art and textile production. Underlying the correlation of these
phenomena are acts of remembering and being remembered.

Aso-ebi and the Economy of Dress and Memory

'Aso-ebi'
I have seen madness dissolve madness
And craze beget yet another craze
And fashion turn the scales of praise
And clothes give a false look of freshness
And yards of aso-ebi threaten the sky
Settling friends and parting them
Leaving many homes high and dry
The steersman knocked off the helm.

146
-T. C. Nwosu 1965231

This eight-line poem from an issue of Nigeria Magazine articulates the social
pressures that might accompany participation in the sartorial practice of aso-ebi. The
poem was written five years after Nigeria gained her independence, a time when the
role of portrait and commemorative cloth in political and other social occasions
reached new heights. These trends helped to drive aso-ebi’s expansion beyond a
family-bound practice of the Yoruba to include friends, colleagues, church
congregations, sports teams, political parties, wedding guests, even strangers
seeking acceptance into a given social group. It was also no longer an exclusively
Yoruba tradition, but was used to visually unite groups across new boundaries and
identities. As one scholar argued, “aso-ebi negotiates the limits of trans-cultural
diffusion by filtering into other ethnic groups both in Nigeria and other West African
sub-regions,” suggesting that this primarily Yoruba practice has played an important
role in the drive towards national unity over ethnic difference in the decades following
1960.232 In other words, aso-ebi had the capacity to unite citizens of a new nation
through an aesthetic of patterned uniformity without sacrificing individuality or
erasing ethnicity. In much the same manner that the Zaria artists sought to transcend
ethnic and religious difference through a synthesized aesthetic in visual art, aso-ebi
evolved by integrating the past with the modern present through the medium of the
textile.

Although the exact origins of aso-ebi are unknown, the issue of financial strain it
placed on practitioners leaving many homes high and dry and its apparent increasing
rate of occurrence was well underway by the first decades of the 20th century.233 At
this time, newspapers in Nigeria were receiving letters to the editor from readers who
complained about the increasing costs and pressures to keep up with the demands
of aso-ebi, particularly in the event of a wedding when it was customary for the
groom to pay to attire the bride’s entire family, known as Owo Aso Iyawo. Some
readers wrote in support of the custom but warned that it could get out of hand, while

231
Published in Nigeria Magazine September 1965, No. 86, page 221. Literary supplement
edited by Onuora Nzekwu. Published by Government of Nigeria, Lagos, Nigeria
232
Okechukwu Nwafor, “The Fabric of Friendship: Aso Ebi and the Moral Economy of Amity
in Nigeria,” African Studies 72, no. 1 (April 2013): 4.
233
While one source places its invention at the dawn of colonialism (Olukoju 1992, 2006),
another dates it (falsely and without evidence) to 1920 (Akinwumi 1990).
147
others called it “degrading,” “worthless” and “deplorable.”234 The financial concerns
that have become a hallmark of public discourse surrounding aso-ebi prove to be
over a century old. This early and ongoing discourse is significant because it sheds
light on aso-ebi’s ties to the economy and the shifts towards an import-reliant textile
industry that continues to dominate the landscapes of fashion and aso-ebi practice in
21st century Nigeria. These shifts had significant consequences for indigenous
textiles.

By the 1940s, the popularity of indigenous fabrics, such as the Yoruba woven aso-
oke cloth, and indigenous styles of dress for special occasions were on the rise,
particularly among urban residents.235 Even though factory-produced imported cloth
from Europe was widely available at the time, aso-ebi occasions were considered
special and therefore indigenous fabrics and styles were still a popular choice for
celebrants. Particularly for politically active citizens, indigenous textiles represented
high quality domestic production and a symbolic rejection of European imports.236
However, the expansion of aso-ebi in both frequency and volume necessarily
sparked a transition from locally produced fabrics to factory prints, albeit even as
styles of indigenous dress became increasingly popular. This shift, and the
mechanisms that brought it about, are evidenced by the case of the Anglican Church
in Ondo. In this Yoruba town, Christianity was recognized and practiced in the mid-
19th century and the church routinely commissioned commemorative cloths for its
congregation on the anniversaries of the church’s 1875 founding and other
significant events.

On the occasion of the church’s jubilee celebration in 1925, the reverend proposed
that the congregation adopt a locally woven commemorative cloth to have as its own
aso-ebi uniform that would serve as both a sign of belonging to the church as well as
a way of recognizing the significance of the 50-year anniversary. The reverend
chose a local cloth called lubolegunekan, which was considered the finest example

234
Aiye K’Oto, “Aso Ebi,” The Nigerian Chronicle, April 10, 1914, sec. Letters to the Editor, 4.
235
Based on Wass’ findings in her study of a Lagos family from 1900-1979. She notes that
Western dress was widespread in the first decades of the 20th century for the purposes of
special occasions in urban areas. Likely, Western dress was less popular in rural areas.
See: Betty M. Wass, “Yoruba Dress in Five Generations of a Lagos Family,” in The Fabrics
of Culture: The Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment, ed. Justine M. Cordwell and
Ronald A. Schwarz (The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton Publishers, 1979), 331–48.
236
Wass, 338.
148
of local weaving.237 Over the fifty years since its founding, the church’s small
congregation had grown considerably. The aso-ebi order to outfit each of the
church’s members in lubolegunekan amounted to several thousand meters of hand-
woven cloth. This proved to be an impossible task for the women weavers who
would have had to fill the order before the anniversary celebration. Once it was
apparent that the order was too large for the weavers to fulfill, the reverend decided
to seek out a stripe-patterned, factory-made cloth that resembled the lubolegunekan
instead. When a search of the markets in Lagos and Ibadan turned up nothing of the
kind, the reverend brought a sample of the locally woven cloth to a bishop in Lagos
who commissioned a printed replica of the lubolegunekan to be made in England.

The printed cloth was not only swiftly produced in time for the congregation members
to tailor it into new outfits, but at 3 shillings for five meters it was more affordable
than the locally produced textile.238 The low cost made the cloth accessible to all
members of the congregation, and it also allowed for pieces of the fabric to be given
as gifts to non-members with the aim of recruiting new followers to the church.239
Wearing the cloth was a symbol of one’s conversion to Christianity and belonging to
the church community, but it was also symbolic of the Yoruba culture of Ondo. The
striped cloth appealed to the local aesthetic of Ondo residents, reflecting foresight by
the church leaders who used the visual language of an indigenous textile pattern to
promote and integrate a relatively new and foreign religion.

Three more commemorative cloths for the Anglican Church of Ondo would follow in
1975, 1982 and 2002. No commemorative cloth was printed in 1950 because the
church lacked the funds to order cloth from the UK, and no Nigerian factories existed
at the time.240 Taken together with the 1925 lubolegunekan replica print, the latter
three cloths roughly outline the trajectory of large-scale orders for commemorative
aso-ebi, otherwise known as aso-odun. All three of the cloths were factory produced
and featured graphics, portraits, or both, suggesting a definitive shift away from a
specific local aesthetic towards a contemporary one. Following the trends for mid-
20th century graphic prints across Africa, the iconography of these cloths sought to

237
Tunde M. Akinwumi and Elisha P. Renne, “Commemorative Textiles and Anglican Church
History in Ondo, Nigeria,” Textile 6, no. 2 (2008): 131.
238
Akinwumi and Renne, 132.
239
Akinwumi and Renne, 140.
240
Akinwumi and Renne, 141.
149
reinforce ideas of progress and modernity. Through illustrations of esteemed church
members, emblems of education and material wealth, and the church’s buildings,
which reflected its growing acceptance amongst the local population through
affluence, such textiles contributed to processes of development by illustrating
various ideas about modernity and distributing them to the masses. By voicing
collective aspirations for the future and inscriptions of the past through the
vernacular of the printed textile, the Anglican Church of Ondo’s commemorative
cloths were consistent with emergent trends in national and Pan-African printed
occasional cloth.241

For the church’s centennial celebration in 1975, the congregation size exceeded
20,000 members. By this time the Nigerian textile industry was producing its own
factory printed cloth, allowing the church to avoid the expensive outsourcing that
prevented them from commissioning a cloth in 1950. Printed in Lagos by the Nigeria
Textile Mills, the centennial cloth featured a repeating pattern of four round vignettes
displaying one of the church’s original leaders, Bishop Charles Phillips, a Nigerian
Christian family, a collection of Christian symbols, and an image of the Anglican
Church Cathedral of Ondo. By 1982, the church’s proposed design shifted away
from the depictions of individual church leaders towards generalized Christian motifs
such as bibles inscribed with uplifting psalms. The 2002 version combined images of
the church and other symbols of Christianity while reintroducing portraits of church
leaders. These design choices, which were often heavily influenced by the wealthy
and educated congregation members, reflect not only the values of that group, but
also a desire for the cloth to function as a historical document.242

The significance of the Anglican Church of Ondo’s use of commemorative cloth and
participation in aso-ebi is two-fold. First, the attempt and failure in 1925 to use a
locally woven textile for aso-ebi provides insight into how aso-ebi presented
opportunity to spurn local handmade production, and paradoxically, fabric orders of
the magnitude required to clothe entire church congregations are in part responsible
for the increase in demand for cheap, factory produced and imported fabrics, and a

241
Catherine P. Bishop, “African Occasional Textiles: Vernacular Landscapes of
Development,” African Arts 47, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 72–74.
242
Akinwumi and Renne, “Commemorative Textiles and Anglican Church History in Ondo,
Nigeria,” 140–41.
150
turn away from indigenous production. Second, the stark differences in the design of
the commissioned patterns from one anniversary celebration to the next roughly
trace the evolution of consumer tastes in aso-ebi commemorative fabrics, which
began with a preference for designs that resembled indigenous textiles and shifted
towards photo-realistic representations of well-known persons and places, which
coincides with the post-Independence popularity for portrait cloths used for
nationalist and political purposes. Later cloths continued with the photo-realistic
designs but featured symbols that represented modernity and progress in favor of
specific identities, and finally re-integrated the portrait alongside symbolic graphics
and text.

These findings coincide with the use of printed commemorative cloths for the royal
family of Benin. Since 1978, remembrance of the king, or Oba, has been conducted
through the commissioning of a portrait cloth from a Nigerian textile firm. Although
these printed fabrics did not replace an indigenous fabric in the commemoration of
individuals, the combination of realistic depictions of the deceased with emblems
from Benin’s rich cultural past in the form of the Queen mother head, situate the
deceased in a long line of Edo cultural achievement and royalty. 243 Thus, there are
parallels between the use of commemorative print cloth by the Yoruba and the Edo,
the religious and the royal realms. Above all, both groups incorporated familiar
iconography (in the lubolegunekan and the Queen mother pendant) with the modern
advantages of the printed cloth in the making of a new custom. The effect of these
choices is that of continuity between indigenous culture prior to colonization and
culture in the post-colony, expressed through the factory printed cloth.

The printed cloth is the vehicle through which the photographic pattern is
disseminated to the people, and through which the people express their allegiance to
the Edo hegemonic order. Yet, it is the photograph itself that operates to secure that
hegemony by “constructing and construing the past and its presence in the
incumbent reigning Oba.”244 In particular, an image by Nigerian photographer J. A.
Greene of Oba Ovonramwen following his capture and exile by colonial forces, has

Peju Layiwola, “Royal Textiles of Benin,” The Nigerian Field 74 (October 2009): 15.
243

Charles D. Gore, “Commemoration, Memory and Ownership: Some Social Contexts of

244

Contemporary Photography in Benin City, Nigeria,” Visual Anthropology: Published in

Cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology 14, no. 3 (2001): 328.
151
played a key role as a representation of the monarchy. Ovonramwen’s exile was part
of the British Punitive Expedition of 1897 that aimed to bring the Kingdom of Benin
under the control of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate. It was through this Expedition
that the British seized a number of court art objects seen on other Oba’s
commemorative cloths. Many of the objects remain, controversially, in British
possession. Therefore, their images, and the images of deceased or deposed
monarchs reconstitute the Benin royal court in the collective Edo memory, not simply
for the sake of remembrance but as acts of recognition of the continuing legitimacy
of the pre-colonial kingdom, even within the current nation-state of Nigeria.245

The Rise of Factory Print

With the Edo case as well as the Church of Ondo, the ability to print portraits,
photographs and other photo-realistic representations on cloth had clear and
important uses. But it was also the ability to distribute the cloth to the masses that
ensured its appearance in the public sphere, allowing it to function collectively as
gestures of remembrance or allegiance.

Further case studies also shed light on the burgeoning of factory print. A study by
Okechukwu Nwafor that sought to identify 20th century aso-ebi trends over the
course of four decades from 1960 to 2000 found an increase in the use of factory
print by the public in celebrating special events. This study, which used the work of
Nigerian photographer J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere as visual documentation of Lagos
women in aso-ebi uniform, concluded that in addition to responding to international
fashion trends, aso-ebi preferences for specific cloth shifted significantly from a
preference for Yoruba aso-oke, adire, and Austrian and Swiss lace to a widespread
adoption of factory prints, or ankara in Nigerian parlance, in the practice of aso-

245
Gore, 327.
152
ebi.246,247 Beyond changing preferences for materials, this study also observed
significant change in individual interpretations of dress codes and a loosening of aso
ebi’s unofficial guidelines. While Ojeikere’s images of women in aso-ebi uniform
reveal an adherence to uniformity in the use of identical fabrics and identical
combinations of skirt, blouse, and gele, by contrast, an image taken by the author of
the study documented an example of aso-ebi trends in 2003 that indicated that the
codes of sartorial conduct when it comes to taking part in aso-ebi have loosened
significantly. The four women in the author’s image each wear an outfit composed of
identical ankara, but the similarity ends there. They exercise choice and
individualism in the styles the fabric has been tailored into, the addition of different
colored trim, the color of fabric used for their gele, and a diversity of accessories.248
Thus, as aso-ebi became more embedded in the social landscape of urban Lagos,
the expression of individualism through accessories and styles of tailoring was
permitted by adhering to the code of uniformity embodied by the factory printed
textiles. In a sense, the factory print allowed aso-ebi participants to stretch the limits
of uniqueness within conformity. In doing so, Lagos’ citizens reinvented the notion of
a national or culture-specific fashion.

A third study relevant to dress in Lagos looked at photographs from five generations
of an elite Lagos family. It reveals ways that notions of the ‘indigenous’ were
immersed with personal and familial dress over the course of the 20th century.
Conducted by Betty Wass, the study examines a period from 1900 to 1974. It divides
this time into three parts (1900-1939, 1940-1959, 1960-1974) and observes the
shifting trends from period to period across age, marital status, education, and
gender. Among a number of clearly visible shifts in the dress habits of the family’s

246
The origin of the term ankara is disputed. Oyedele and Babatunde explain (without
providing evidence or referring to their source) that a young Nigerian “girl named Ankara was
given to the cheaper version of the Dutch Wax made by the Turks which was at the reach of
the poor and was considered indigenous due to its vibrant colour and motif.” John Picton
suggests that the term comes from the Yoruba word for Accra, the Ghanaian city from where
many foreign fabrics may have been imported to Nigerian markets. Pat Oyelola also cites
the Yoruba name for Accra, ‘ankra’ as the source of the name, See: Pat Oyelola, “The
Acculturation of Factory Print,” The Nigerian Field 72 (2007): 3.; Carol Tulloch, ed., Black
Style (London: V&A Publications, n.d.), 21.; Ayokanmi Motunrayo Tolulope Oyedele and
Obisesan Babatunde, “The Resurgence of Ankara Materials in Nigeria,” Journal of Education
and Practice 4, no. 17 (2013): 167.
247
Nwafor, “The Fabric of Friendship: Aso Ebi and the Moral Economy of Amity in Nigeria,”
4.
248
Nwafor, 4–6.
153
many members, Wass identifies several that are relevant to the discussion of aso-ebi
in 20th century Lagos. Over the course of the early, middle and late periods, Wass
found that in general, indigenous styles of dress increased significantly. The author
found correlations between indigenous dress choice and gender as well as
education. Women tended to wear indigenous styles more often than men
(approximately 40% women vs.11% men) even from the early period when use of
indigenous styles was at the lowest rate throughout the study. Women’s use
increased steadily but incrementally over the three periods, whereas men’s use of
indigenous dress tripled after 1940. This increase in indigenous styles of dress in the
middle period is attributed to an increase in nationalistic sentiment, which was
expressed by educated, urban Lagosians through a rejection of Western style
dress.249

Finally, Wass notes that in the early period there was little mixing of indigenous and
Western styles.250 This changes however in the middle period when it became
common, for instance, to wear shoes and a handbag (which were previously
considered Western) with an indigenous style garment.251 This mixing signaled the
disintegration of two previously distinct categories, as well as an increasingly wealthy
population that could now afford multiple outfits and accessories such as jewelry and
handbags. It also signaled the increasing agency of individuals in shaping
interpretations of the “indigenous” in fashion. A woman could dress in iro and buba
made of fine imported cloth that reflected a cosmopolitan sense of style. Both the
meanings and modes of dress were under constant reinvention. For example,
whereas Western styles of business suits and tailored dresses once symbolized a
highly educated person, it lost these associations in the 1940s and 1950s. By then,
strict codes of fashion were being broken down into elements that were remixed into
new, hybrid forms of dress.

Within this study, indigenous dress did not necessarily mean the wearing of
indigenous fabrics, nor a strict adherence to “traditional” garments and styling.
Although textiles such as adire and aso-oke are identifiable in some of the
photographs from the early and middle period in Wass’s study, it is not always

249
Wass, “Yoruba Dress in Five Generations of a Lagos Family,” 338.
250
Wass, 334.
251
Wass, 340.
154
apparent whether the fabrics were produced domestically or imported. Wass does
mention, however, that during the politically active decades leading up to and
immediately following independence, indigenous fabrics were enjoying a revived
appreciation amongst elites. Yet, although these handcrafted items were promoted
as being of equal quality to European imports and aligned with pro-nationalist
interests, consumers still preferred the variety and affordability of European factory
imports when it came to their own wardrobes.252

Although these studies differ significantly in their focus groups and objectives, all
roughly sketch a similar trajectory suggesting that over the course of the 20th century
aso-ebi and commemorative practices proliferated, engaging larger groups of people
and with greater frequency. As this unfolded, the taste and necessity for cheaper,
widely available factory prints grew, and the market that supplied these ankara
fabrics grew along with it.

In today’s social milieu, ankara remains the primary choice for aso-ebi practitioners
because it offers an enormous selection of patterns in a wide range of quality and
prices. This is significant because within owambe party culture and other social
events that call for aso-ebi, the purchase of a cloth is part of a cycle of gift giving
whereby, although the textile serves as the vehicle through which the gift is
bestowed, it is merely the first step in a series of exchanges or refusals that mediate
one’s standing in the social sphere. According to one source, the aim of the initial
selection is to find a cloth that looks expensive with a low price point. The fabric is
then sold to the celebrant’s friends and family members with a mark-up of about 50%
of the original cost. The benefit of this exchange for the celebrant is that he or she
recovers some or all of the cost of the party. A higher mark-up however, particularly
on an already expensive cloth, can amount to a subtle means of extortion.253

The benefit for the party attendees who partake in purchasing and wearing the cloth
are more nuanced, they range from a token gift bag containing small trinkets to
larger displays of appreciation such as being served the best food during the

252
Wass, 338.
Tobias Wendl, “Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern
253

Ghana,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 39 (2001): 81.

155
meal.254 By contrast, opting out of the selected aso-ebi attire can have adverse
effects on the partygoers, which include being denied the best food, or being left out
of group photographs. These numerous exchanges of gift and counter-gift are not
finished after the celebration ends, but rather they inspire those who attended to
throw their own celebrations, partially motivated by a desire to recover the cost of
attending the previous party, creating a cyclical system of exchange. Participation in
this system requires investments of both time and money, creating a financial
obstacle towards social acceptance and an elevated social status. The line from
Nwosu’s poem, and fashion turn the scales of praise, encapsulates the direct
relationship between dress, as it is often dictated by aso-ebi, and social acceptance
or rejection.

Modernity and Synthesis in Nigerian Fashion since 1960

The studies by Nwafor, Wass, and that of the Anglican Church of Ondo revealed
similar findings about the shifting meaning behind dress according to cultural and
national values, as well as the development of modern dress through a mixing of
indigenous, Western, and newly invented styles. Specifically, Nwafor’s study
highlighted the adaptation of the mini-skirt, a wildly popular fashion trend of the
1960s born in London, into aso-ebi attire by fashioning them out of indigenous-style
fabrics. Wass’ study called attention to the role that anti-colonial politics played in
shaping the fashions of educated, urban elites, while the congregation members of
the Anglican Church of Ondo demonstrated a collective desire for progress through
their choice of cloth designs. As these trends developed at a time of nationalist
fervor, fashion designers, textile manufacturers and tailors found themselves at the
frontier of political movement as they helped shape the tastes and styles of modern
dress. A photograph of a woman and her child dressed in outfits tailored from factory
print cloth celebrating the Nigeria’s independence in 1960 illustrates how a cloth
commemorating Nigerian Independence from Britain functioned as an expression of
patriotism and solidarity with fellow citizens. The woman’s wrapper is patterned with
a lion, the Nigerian flag and a crown motif similar to that seen on oloba patterns, as
well as the words “Nigeria” and “Freedom.” Her child wears a different design

254
Oba Adeoye, “The ASO-EBI Factor and the Yorubas,” Blog, Oba’ Adeoye 1st, (Accessed
July 12, 2016).
156
featuring “1960 Independence” (Figure 3.1). The woman’s sandals and jewelry
combine with the political message of her iro and gele to create a form of dress that
draws upon both notions of “traditional” and “modern” set within the specific context
of the newly founded nation of Nigeria.

A founding figure of Nigeria’s modern fashion and a contemporary of the Zaria Art
Society artists, Folashade Thomas-Fahm further transformed these two notions of
dress through her own fashion line and ideology. Thomas-Fahm believed that
personal aesthetics were integral to the successful formation of a new nation and the
modern self. Proper dress was an expression of pride in oneself, and by extension,
of pride for one’s country. Thus, nationalism could be expressed through something
as simple as a well-tailored outfit.255 For her, dressing well was more than just a
choice of what to wear. It meant selecting the best fabrics in suitable weights and
colors, and tailoring the fabric such that the garment complemented the female form,
and completing the look with proper footwear and accessories. Good personal
hygiene, good-posture, carrying oneself with poise and using good manners all
contributed to this vision of one’s best self, a self that collectively would be the face
of the new nation. "The way to the nation's heart" she writes "could be the way you
dress, what you wear and the way you wear it."256 Thomas-Fahm made dressing well
not just a goal for the elite and wealthy, but for everyone. To her it was a political
imperative.

In 1967, the Zaria artist Yusuf Grillo was teaching at the Fine Arts Department in
Yabatech when he met Folashade Thomas-Fahm for the first time. A few years out
of a fashion design course at St. Martin’s College of Art in London and beginning to
make a name for herself as the first fashion designer in Lagos, Thomas-Fahm invited
Grillo to come and see her show at the University of Lagos. Several years prior to
coming into contact with the Zaria alumnus, Thomas-Fahm was already
experimenting with the ways locally produced fabrics such as adire and aso-oke
could be reinvented through a fusion of modern, Western, and indigenous styles.
Working independently in a manner remarkably similar to the Natural Synthesis
artists, Thomas-Fahm developed new fashions that drew upon existing modes of

255
Shade Thomas-Fahm, Faces of She (Lagos, Nigeria: Tegali Communications, 2004),
180–81.
256
Thomas-Fahm, 180.
157
dress including gele, iro and buba, in ways that reflected a deep knowledge and
respect for the social and historical significance of dress in urban Nigerian culture,
and the business acumen to recognize the enormous opportunity for a brand based
on local aesthetics and values. These new designs, such as the adire kaftan
intended for women to wear in the home while entertaining guests or an adire eleko
midi-dress inspired by Western cuts, were tailor-made to suit individual women but
maintained a larger, nationalist vision for Nigerian fashion (figure 3.2).

Indeed, dress was essential to independence movements and processes of

decolonization in Nigeria and throughout Africa, as well as to the formation of pan-
African identity and ideology that extended beyond the continent to African American
culture and diaspora communities throughout the world. Thomas-Fahm may have
been the pioneer of turning what was coming to be known as ‘national dress’ in
Nigeria into a career in design, but she was not alone in her vision of the role of
dress as a strategy in the process of decolonization. Across the continent, personal
dress was on the frontline in a visualization of political autonomy. Kwame Nkrumah,
the first president of a newly independent Ghana, made a symbolic gesture of
wearing the kente cloth produced by the Asante people. Specifically, he employed a
pattern of kente previously reserved for royalty among the Asante kingdom, even
though he was neither royalty, nor Asante. The idea was that the textile would retain
its significations of power, authority, and royalty even when removed from its original
context. For Nkrumah, this political manipulation of the cloth proved a powerful visual
statement as he espoused his Pan-African vision and ideology.

Prior to becoming president, Nkrumah had already practiced with forms of dress as a
political strategy by wearing the north Ghanaian tunic called batakali whenever he
addressed the Convention People’s Party. This attire was usually accompanied by a
passionate speech to his fellow party members, however, at more somber
occasions, such as when he addressed the National Assembly, Nkrumah wore a
Western style business suit.257 Nkrumah’s fall from power also demonstrated the
ways that a turn of events or public opinion could be equally powerful forces in
determining the meaning of a textile or garment. A kente cloth once known by the

257
Barbara S. Monfils, “A Multifaceted Image: Kwame Nkrumah’s Extrinsic Rhetorical
Strategies,” Journal of Black Studies 7, no. 3 (March 1977): 314–15.
158
title “Fathia befits Nkrumah” after the engagement of Nkrumah to Fathia Helen Ratzk
was later renamed “One man does not rule a nation,” a proverbial title alluding to
Nkrumah’s later years when he was ousted in a military coup. His political enemies
were the ones who renamed the cloth as part of a smear campaign against him, but
it stuck in the minds of the public long after he was out of office.258

Textiles, Photography and the Desire to Remember and be Remembered

Perhaps equally as important as controlling one’s appearance is controlling the

documentation of that appearance. At a certain point in Nkrumah’s political career,
he made sure that he was wearing kente in nearly every official portrait photograph,
ensuring that image of him would spread even in his physical absence. In doing so,
Nkrumah elected a popular tactic for his own self-representation: manipulating image
through the use of textiles in photography.

Well before Nkrumah’s portraits in kente, textiles and portrait photography had
established a long, interconnected history in West Africa. While the portrait and
occasional textile demonstrate a straightforward merging of photography with textile
material and pattern, a person’s values were displayed through the medium of the
cloth in less obvious ways. Before the invention of graphics on cloth, the textile
served the purpose of garment, backdrop, and prop to the portraitist and his or her
subjects. Composing a portrait also meant selecting, draping, or displaying textiles to
the desired effect. The overlap between these two practices speaks to the
importance of remembering, and the equal weight that photography and textiles hold
in that process. The desire to be seen and remembered at one’s best works in
cooperation with portrait photography. Even in the instance where the sitter does not
have the resources for a new outfit or expensive accessories, the photographer can
provide some as props, such that the image will convey affluence through fine
fabrics and designer pieces, even where it does not exist.

Reminiscent of the frontal position of King George on the adire oloba

commemorative cloth, which allowed him to appear stately and dignified and to show
off his garments in full, conventions of early Nigerian portrait photography indicate a

258
See chapter four of Kente Cloth: History and Culture (UK: XLibris Publishing, 2017). (no
page numbers)
159
desire on the part of the sitter to be captured, and thereby remembered, at their best.
Since these frontal positions did not coincide with the conventions of European
portraiture, it likely reflects choices made by the pattern designer or portraitist to
comply with local conventions. The tendency to emphasize wealth through lavish
displays of textiles or other material objects can also be observed in portrait studios
across West Africa. In Ghana, the role of textiles in portraiture were so intertwined
that it was common for the occupations of portrait photographer and tailor to be held
by the same person, removing the middleman from the transaction where a
customer wanted to be photographed in a new outfit.259 The practices of pioneering
African portraitists like J.A. Greene and Chief S.O. Alonge of Nigeria, Malick Sidibe
and Seydou Keita of Mali have been explored at length elsewhere (Geary 1988;
Enwezor, Oguibe and Zaya 1996; Wendl and Behrend 1998; Haney 2004; Enwezor
2006; Leers 2013; Peffer and Cameron 2013; Anderson and Aronson 2011; Staples,
Kaplan and Freyer, 2017), but it is worth noting that portrait photographers today,
though often removed from the studio to makeshift stands at events, work with a
similar objective to their predecessors to capture their sitters in the glory of their full
attire. These contemporary photographers utilize portraiture in asserting their place
in the continuity of West African photographic legacies. In Nigeria, such practices
include George Osodi and Adolphus Opara both of who presented portraitist series
in recent years such as Osodi’s ‘Nigerian Monarchs’ and Opara’s exploration of the
custodians of Yoruba Orisha spirituality.

Portraitist collections contain invaluable visual archives of fashion trends, material

fads, and speak to the values of the sitters and the societies they were a part of over
a period of time spanning several decades. Thus, photographs, along with the
textiles or fashions they capture, serve documentary and historiographical purposes
as well. Some artists and photographers have seized upon the photograph’s
documentary capacity in order to engage with their personal or cultural pasts. The
works of Kelani Abass, a painter and multi-media artist, blend photography, painting,
performance and installation to mine his family’s rich history as a material and
conceptual archive. Many of these works, such as “Àsìkò 2 (Family Album Series),

259
Kerstin Pinther, “Textiles and Photography in West Africa,” trans. Julia Ng, Critical
Interventions 1, no. 1 (2007): 113.; Wendl, “Entangled Traditions: Photography and the
History of Media in Southern Ghana,” 84.
160
utilize textiles in two forms (figure 3.3). Abass integrates family photographs into his
paintings in which the family members are dressed in the same cloth featuring a
carton of eggs pattern. The textile serves to identify and unify members of the family
during the events, as well as in the photos that survive it. In “Àsìkò 2,” the archival
photos are enlarged and reproduced on a deep blue background, which is a
deviation from the ochre-hued compositions that make up the majority of the series.
At first, Abass did not associate the use of the color blue with indigo, but later
ventured to say that indigo dyeing had been part of his experience as a child growing
up in Abeokuta where his stepmother, who had been involved in making adire, would
make textile designs with him and the other children.260

The title “Àsìkò” is the Yoruba word for time. It was also the title of the solo show at
the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, which was called “Àsìkò: Evoking personal
narratives and collective histories.” The word encapsulates both the photograph’s
ability to capture or suspend time as well as the inevitable passage of time
represented by the artist’s generational connection to the people in the images. In
his own words, “[Photographic reproduction] captures an illusion; the intermingling of
two inseparable elements, time and space, and the overlap of the past and the
future.”261

Many of the photos reproduced in Abass’ work are taken from family owambe
celebrations that took place around the time of independence. As these aso-ebi
events became more ubiquitous, it opened doors for aspiring amateur photographers
who were hired to capture the occasion. According to Abass, these parties and their
documentation were critical tools in the preservation of culture at a time when
Western influence was still pervasive.262 However, the photographs also document
the formation of culture. Rather than a neat divide between past and present,
indigenous and foreign culture, or a simple overlap of the two, these photographs
and the works that they are integrated into show how owambe and fashion trends
were utilized in the reinvention of culture for the independence era. Thus, as the
subtitle for the exhibition suggests, the works are not just about Abass’ familial

260
Kelani Abass, interview with Erin Rice, March 28, 2014, at CCA Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria.
261
Kelani Abass, “Àsìkò: Evoking Personal Narratives and Collective History (Exhibition
Catalogue)” (Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, 2013), 14.
262
Abass, 26.
161
history, but rather the images are representative of a national or Nigerian culture at
large and its ongoing process of evolution.

This collective aspect of owambe and aso-ebi fashion is especially evident in the
work of photographer Jide Alakija. Based in London, Alakija documents the
extension of aso-ebi practices in weddings amongst the expatriate Nigerian
community in the UK. He also documents weddings in Lagos. The images capture
the variety of aso-ebi manifestations and the creativity with which wedding guests
conform to the dress code while expressing their own individuality. However,
removed from the context of Lagos or Nigeria, aso-ebi serves to culturally identify an
entire expatriate community with Nigeria.

The artist stresses that the practice of aso-ebi at an event increases the importance
of photography. Each guest, who has undoubtedly put in a considerable amount of
money and effort into their outfit, may want to have their individual full-length portrait
taken as a keepsake. The photograph and the outfit each play an instrumental role in
the making of a memory of the day. Whereas the photo serves to document the
subject’s attendance at the event, and his or her dedication to the host’s aso-ebi
wishes, the textile, it’s pattern and color indicate the association the subject has to
the host or hosts, since different cloths may be chosen for familial ties to the bride or
groom, or other distinctions. 263

As the traditional portrait has been displaced by the ubiquity of cameras, selfies, and
the sheer frequency of events requiring a professional photographer, the overlap
between fashion, photography, social gatherings and cultural expression has
become increasingly pronounced. Alakija notes that in the UK, weddings and events
have average attendances of 300 guests, a manageable number for a single
photographer. By contrast, it is not out of the ordinary in Nigeria for 2000 guests to
attend a single event.264 These numbers not only indicate the growing need for
multiple photographers at Nigerian events, but they provide insight into the sheer
volume of fabric required for an event where thousands of attendees are dressed in
aso-ebi uniform. The frequency and volume of aso-ebi’s occurrence have

263
“Jide Alakija in conversation with Clara Giacalone and Jude Anogwih” in exhibition
catalogue for Owambe, Aso-Ebi and the Politics of Dress: Jide Alakija (Lagos, Centre for
Contemporary Art, Lagos) 2011.
264
Ibid.
162
undoubtedly played a role in the circumstances of the Nigerian textile market over
the course of the 20th century. The extent of that role has yet to be thoroughly
explored, however, photographic records indicate the popularity of foreign fabrics in
the Nigerian sartorial landscape. From Dutch wax prints to Austrian and Swiss lace
and factory prints from multiple sources, Nigeria has long been a major consumer of
textile imports. Over the course of the last thirty years, the rising industrial power of
China and other Asian manufacturers have brought about seismic shifts in global
textile trade. For Nigerians, cheap cloth imported or smuggled form China has
brought both devastation to the domestic textile manufacturing sector, and affordable
fabric to the Nigerian consumer.

But Them Can’t Be God: Chinese textiles in Nigerian dress and contemporary
art

The tendency towards factory prints illustrated by aso-ebi’s 20th century development
and expansion reveals how the increasing demand for low-cost fabrics in high
quantities has contributed to the closure of nearly all the nation’s textile factories.
Initially, Nigerians sought to offset the reliance on imports of printed cotton fabrics
from European manufacturers. Numerous textile factories opened around the time
of independence to supply the national market for printed fabrics with products made
in Nigeria. Starting with the first factory opening in Kaduna in 1956, the industry grew
rapidly into the 1980s to the point where it employed over 1 million people,
generated over 1 billion NGN in yearly revenue, and with over 200 companies
throughout the country was the second largest textile manufacturer in Africa, second
only to Egypt.265 The federal military government became actively involved in
protecting the Nigerian textile industry through policies such as the Indigenisation
Decree of 1972 whereby foreigners were forced to divest from textile businesses in
order to give Nigerians more share of the national economy and promote
homegrown industry. However the policy also brought adverse effects for many
Nigerians whose businesses relied partially on foreign imports and investments,
including those who were already actively promoting sales of indigenous textiles.266

265
Akinrinade and Ogen, “Globalization and De-Industrialization: South-South Neo-
Liberalism and the Collapse of the Nigerian Textile Industry,” 163.
266
See for example how Folashade Thomas-Fahm’s Lagos based fashion business was
forcibly taken over by the military on the grounds that it did not comply with the decree:
Thomas-Fahm, Faces of She, 171–73.
163
By the 1990s and 2000s the companies that once thrived and employed hundreds of
thousands of Nigeria’s workforce were struggling to remain profitable. Their struggles
were due to a number of factors that included the collapse of Nigeria’s oil refineries
prompting a reliance on low-grade imported fuel, inadequate infrastructure and
escalating operating costs, and the influx of cheap Chinese fabrics that came to
Nigerian markets through smuggling or through legal trade made possible under the
guise of South-South cooperation and the Structural Adjustment Programs instigated
by the International Monetary Fund. The prices of Chinese imports were set so low
that the competition was nearly eliminated, and any attempt at regulating the trade
was undermined by rampant smuggling, counterfeiting, and government
corruption.267 By 2007 the Guardian reported that 80% of Nigeria’s textile market
was dominated by Asian imports. A combination of these factors brought roughly 170
of Nigeria’s textile manufacturers to close by 2008.268

In recent years, the contemporary states of fashion and a bleak outlook for the
domestic textile economy have factored into textile-based and textile-inspired
contemporary Nigerian art. Some of these artists, such as Obinna Makata and
Victoria Udondian have used the textile and scraps of clothing as metaphors for
rampant consumerism, using fabric scraps to provide both a material and conceptual
starting point for their work. A 2017 project has collectively taken this metaphor one
step further by using the Chinese influence on the Nigerian textile sector as a vehicle
through which to explore the broader economic relationship between China and
Nigeria. Under the umbrella project, ‘ChinAfrika. under construction,’ exhibited by the
Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK) in Leipzig several Nigerian artists have
taken this topic to task, while artists from other parts of the continent look at the
relationship from other angles.

Using the cheap factory printed textile as the lens, one of these artists, Ayo
Akinwande, questions the larger strategy of Chinese involvement in the construction

of Nigerian infrastructure. His installation titled 赢得 – Win (the first word is “win”

267
Akinrinade and Ogen, “Globalization and De-Industrialization: South-South Neo-
Liberalism and the Collapse of the Nigerian Textile Industry,” 167–68.
268
Akinrinade and Ogen, 164–65.
164
written in Chinese characters) uses the formal language of the Yoruba agbada to
address an issue of national significance (figure 3.4).

The agbada is a four-piece men’s outfit composed of pants, a long-sleeved

undershirt (Àwòtélè), a flowing sleeveless robe (Àwòsókè), and a hat (Filà). In
Akinwande’s version, the undershirt and robe are composed of cement bags bearing
the Dangote label, the cement brand manufactured by the megalithic Dangote Group
conglomerate owned by Nigeria’s richest man, Aliko Dangote. Cement bags are
combined with elements that directly reference the CCECC or the China Civil
Engineering Construction Corporation, such as a blue aluminum belt bearing the
acronym and a blue construction hat like the ones worn on their work sites. The
materials are symbolic of the construction sites where they may have been
previously used and discarded, and more significantly, where Chinese presence is
pervasive throughout Nigeria.

Tucked into the pockets of the agbada’s robe are 5NGN (Nigerian Naira) banknotes,
an almost worthless denomination of the nation’s currency that has been subject to
steep depreciation since the mid-1990s. The notes are an allusion to the cheap price
tag on Nigeria’s land and resources, or perhaps to a bribe paid for the rights to those
resources, which the Chinese now have a hold over. Yet the banknotes are only the
most obvious reference to the economic relationship between the two nations. Other
references lie in the shape of the blue belt, which resembles that of a heavyweight
champion’s belt, suggesting that in the wrestling or boxing match between Chinese,
Indians, Lebanese, Europeans and Americans for control over Africa’s resources,
China seems to be emerging as the winner.269

As a popular choice for aso-ebi uniform, particularly for special events, the agbada
represents something of a national outfit. By using the Dangote sack in place of an
actual textile, Akinwande may allude to the monopoly Dangote holds on the industry,
including all Chinese run and sponsored projects. The Dangote sacks serve as a
suggestion that some Nigerians benefit financially from Chinese presence in the
country. Alternatively, the Chinese elements of the agbada (which may include the
sacks if that is where they are made) recall the Chinese domination of the Nigerian

269
Ayo Akinwande, 赢得 – Win, Artist’s text.

165
textile market. Textiles undoubtedly represent one industry where Chinese presence
in Nigeria is far-reaching. The sacks are ubiquitous and instantly recognizable
throughout the country as a Nigerian brand of cement used in Chinese construction
projects. In a sense, the piece becomes emblematic of what it is to be Nigerian in
2017, that is, to live in Chinese fabrics, Chinese houses, Chinese built cities and
drive on Chinese roads while only the lucky few Nigerians are enriched.

On one hand, the agbada form presents a quiet resistance to the pervasiveness of
foreign culture, much in the same way indigenous dress functioned as anti-colonial
expression prior to independence. Following the transition from military rule to
civilian rule in Nigeria, for example, the phrase “from khaki to agbada” was adopted
to draw an analogy between clothing and two types of authority. Whereas khaki
represented the military uniform, the agbada represented civilian dress following the
presidential elections in 1999 in which a new civilian leader was democratically
elected.270 On the other hand, the Dangote label, the blue belt, money, and hat
erode that resistance by suffusing Yoruba dress and custom with cheapness and
corporate branding. It serves as a reminder that culture, along with natural resources
such as land and oil, can also be bought and sold to the highest bidder.

In a final nod to the textile, the undershirt of the agbada contains the transcriptions of
several interviews Akinwande held with market traders working in Lagos’ Balogun
market who do business directly with the Chinese. Handwritten by the interviewees
in Pidgin English or their native Yoruba or Igbo languages, the inscriptions describe
the experiences of the traders and their opinions of the Chinese. The testimony
provides insight into the direct impact of Chinese involvement on individual traders,
and like a factory print carefully chosen for its subtle message, it also communicates
publicly on behalf of the wearer or owner. The messages that emerge, however,
together represent ambivalence towards Chinese involvement in Nigerian economic
affairs. Some traders have been negatively affected by business with the Chinese,
complaining of language barriers, counterfeiters who photograph their wares and
send the images back to China to be copied, and aggressive tactics by Chinese
middlemen. Others, particularly those who were for decades denied visas to Western

270
Elisha P. Renne, “From Khaki to Agbada: Dress and Political Transition in Nigeria,” in
Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress, ed. Jean Allman (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 125.
166
countries and access to European manufactured goods, are happy to do business
with a nation that greets them with open arms and presents far fewer restrictions.
While one inscription claims, “…one day China go rule the world through industry”
another declares “BUT THEM CANT BE GOD.” Their messages vacillate between
praise and criticism, entrenching the work in ambivalence (figure 3.4).

These mixed reactions towards the Chinese also extend to the general public.
According to Akinwande, the broadly negative perspective on Chinese products and
their reputation for poor quality originates in the West. In Nigeria, access to cheap
Chinese products, known locally as “Chinco,” that are much more affordable than
everything else on the market is seen an asset to many Nigerians experiencing
financial difficulty. The lack of quality is only an issue in certain products. Some
garments, for example, do not necessarily need to be of such high quality that they
will last for many years. For special occasions where the garment will be worn only
once a cheap Chinese suit may suffice. The string of imitation coral beads that
accompany Akinwande’s agbada provides an example of the sufficiency of a cheap
substitute. Specifically, the bead necklace shows how Chinese imitations can
seamlessly replace more expensive originals that play an important role in culturally
specific practices. The beads are viewed as a symbol of royalty, originating in Benin.
They are often worn by brides and grooms on their wedding day and for other

special occasions in Benin and Nigeria. A necklace like the one seen in 赢得 – Win

might cost upwards of 25,000 NGN (approximately 80 USD), especially if the beads
are made of semiprecious stones or natural coral. Akinwande’s string of plastic coral
beads that were likely manufactured in China cost a mere 1000 NGN (approximately
3 USD). For many, the cheaper necklaces are indistinguishable from the pricier
versions and do not sacrifice the association with royalty, wealth and status the
beads are meant to convey.271 This helps to explain the popularity of counterfeit
designer textiles supplied by the Chinese that are bought even by wealthy
consumers. Counterfeits are used to create the illusion of affluence and luxury (as
opposed to quality) through a system of signs embedded in its patterns.

271
Ayo Akinwande, interview with Erin Rice via Skype May 31, 2017.
167
Despite the optimistic title, 赢得 – Win is far from a declaration that the growing

influence of China in Nigeria and throughout Africa is going to be beneficial for both
parties. Akinwande suggests that only time will tell who will be the true beneficiary of
this relatively new partnership. If Nigeria’s own textile industry is any indication, the
fate of other industries where Chinese influence has yet to be fully implemented
does not look positive. The direct impact of Chinese trade on domestic textile
production and commerce does not appear to be a concern of the artist. He cites the
idea of a mantle, a heavy garment that rests on the shoulders, as the reasoning
behind using the agbada as the main motif in a work that he explains is about the
larger picture of China’s immense presence throughout Africa, as if the entire
continent were cloaked in a Chinese garment. Akinwande’s piece pares this
metaphor down to a Nigeria-specific uniform without engaging deeply with its
symbolism. However, the mechanisms of the textile and dress are implicitly and

explicitly at work in 赢得 – Win. The cement bag “textile” fashioned into the agbada

robe and undershirt combine two easily recognizable and non-threatening forms
from which Akinwande embarks on an exploration of other, sometimes sensitive
themes. With the inscriptions for example, their messages are not intended to be
read and understood by all of those who view the work. Written in languages
indigenous to Nigeria, and not shared amongst all Nigerians, the inscriptions operate
like some textile patterns that speak only to those who are privy to its meanings and
messages.

Akinwande’s form of dress utilizes the subtlety inherent to the material of a textile
and the subject of dress. He uses the familiarity of the agbada form and the Dangote
label to relate to multiple visual landscapes of Lagos. Inserting accessibility into the
work, the textile constructs a form that is non-threatening in its familiarity yet
presents a platform for critical engagement.

A Rebirth of the Indigenous Textile

Akinwande’s work alludes to the circumstances of the industrial textile, specifically

the Nigerian manufacturer. Of course, there are other players in the industry aside
from Asian manufacturers. These include domestic (i.e. non-industrial) textile
producers and Europeans who have been an integral part of the West African textile

168
trade since pre-colonial times. The conditions that have allowed Chinese products to
dominate the textile industry have also forced these actors to reevaluate their
strategy and role in the Nigerian market. One such European manufacturer, Vlisco,
the Dutch Wax Print producer in Holland, took several steps to rebrand their
products as luxury fabrics in an effort to combat cheap fabrics with high quality ones
that appeal to wealthy and discerning clientele. Faced with sluggish sales and
rampant counterfeiting of their products, Vlisco has carefully controlled where and by
whom their fabrics are sold, assuring clients that the retailers can be trusted to sell
the authentic cloth. Still, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001,
which dropped restrictions on their textile exports, has presented a number of
challenges to Vlisco’s profitability. The legalization of Chinese trade in West Africa
has come with the consequence of imitation cloths that use some of Vlisco’s classic
and best-selling patterns. These counterfeits, although easily distinguishable from
the real Vlisco products at first, have become increasingly sophisticated. The quality
is so high and the price so low in comparison to real Vlisco cloths that even devoted
Vlisco clientele are buying them.272

Since 2004, a number of additional solutions have addressed these problems and
reshaped the Vlisco name and the product. Perhaps most significant of these
changes, Vlisco moved towards a high fashion profile by teaming with designers to
showcase new collections of patterns that they paired with clothing designs and
exclusive retailers in select African cities. Vlisco boutiques now boast Prêt à Porter
lines, removing the tailor from the equation and providing the convenience of a
finished product. Packages from the Prêt-à-Créer line come as boxed sets of Vlisco
fabrics and crystal accessories that when combined with some of the patterns readily
available on their website can help customers create the perfect Vlisco outfit on their
own or with the help of a tailor.

The company strategy also includes seasonal releases of new patterns through a
broad marketing campaign, allowing them to come out a step ahead of the
counterfeiters and work with the fast-paced cycle of fashion seasons. These tactics
appeal to the fashion-savvy consumer and their desires for new, unique patterns (as
opposed to the classic ones that have been produced since the 19 th and early 20th

272
Jos Arts, Vlisco (Netherlands: W Books, 2012), 14–18.
169
centuries) and a product that conveys an image of wealth, success and good taste.
The Luxury Edition fabrics from a 2012 line of Vlisco designs called “Silent Empire,”
for example, featured Swarovski crystals, embroidery, and silver or gold thread,
illustrating how one seasonal line integrated the company’s new strategy to produce
fabrics distinctive in both design and material. The company has also integrated the
custom of giving cloth as gifts by encouraging brides-to-be to “spoil” their friends,
family and guests on the wedding occasion. The same page of the 2015 brochure
advertises a regal blue evening gown, which may signal the intentions of the
company to capture more of the aso-ebi market as a future direction for Vlisco (figure
3.5).

By marketing the company as the producer of new, unique, and “authentic” fabric,
the Vlisco brand aligns itself with a market trend for high-quality, unique fabrics--a
trend that has also permeated indigenous production and aso-ebi commissions.
While the indigenous indigo dyeing industry in the 21st century is of a significantly
smaller scale than in its 20th century heyday, it did not disappear altogether as many
had predicted in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite periods of decline, there is also
ample evidence of its survival and indications that it will be sustained for the future.

A search in 2014 for adire production and sales in the city of Ibadan and the Oje
market that once bustled with adire vendors turned up little except the explanation
that adire vendors had left the market to sell their wares in another part of the city,
and a young man trying to make a niche for himself in the fashion business by resist-
patterning and dyeing second-hand shirts in indigo. However, Abeokuta proved far
more fruitful in the search for production that was running autonomously and
resembled the 20th century industry. The following two case studies present
examples of 21st century dyers who are running indigo dyeing businesses in
Abeokuta that are sustained by local sales. Although Abeokuta was once a major
center for adire dyeing with a large portion of production intended for export, current
local dyers report that their clientele are Nigerians who want products made in
Nigeria in a Nigerian aesthetic. The dyers use a combination of modern and
traditional techniques, and a blend of Nigerian and foreign raw materials. Dyes, for
example, are often imported from Germany, but the cloth they dye on is reportedly
woven in Nigeria’s north, which is a significant departure from the 20th century
accounts of adire production that utilized European cotton almost exclusively. It is in
170
the design of the patterns where these two textile producers diverge. Where one is
committed to unique, bespoke patterns, the other remains a source for “traditional”
patterns to satisfy those clientele that seek products that represent Yoruba or
Nigerian heritage.

Textile designer Akeem Shofolahan of the Masallam Kampala Adire Factory of

Abeokuta developed his local practice beyond the classic patterns of adire,
preferring to work in a wax-resist type of adire dyeing called “English.” In 2014,
Shofolahan was training up to 10 apprentices at a time in his factory. His team was
working on a substantial aso-ebi order of upwards of 300,000 units for the
Redeemed Church’s congregation. The commission was so prized that Shofolahan
feared the design he had made especially for the congregation would be stolen,
copied, and he would be undersold. To prevent this, he worked out of sight of the
public and sold his products directly to his customers rather than at the market.
Unlike nearby adire compounds where women worked outside, patterning, dyeing
and finishing fabrics in plain sight of anyone who walked or drove by, Shofolahan’s
apprentices labored furtively over thousands of yards of cotton inside small, private
studio spaces. They worked at a quick pace with wax, hand-carved stamps, and
multiple applications of different dye colors to produce a unique product that would
represent belonging to the church for anyone who wore it. The final product was a
blue cloth, similar to a natural shade of indigo blue, with alternating squares of
decorative and cowrie shell motifs. Shofolahan went to great lengths to ensure the
design would not be reproduced by anyone else, securing the commission for his
business and assuring his clients that their aso-ebi uniforms would be one of a kind
(figure 3.6, 3.7). It is clear from the design however, that he adhered to an aesthetic
that would appeal to clientele in a town with an adire history. The palette, design,
and grid layout are all reminiscent of classic adire patterns while remaining the
invention of Shofolahan and his team.273

In an adire dyeing compound not far from Shofolahan’s studio, consistency, rather
than secrecy and ingenuity of design, seem to be the key to sustainability. Run by
Iyaalaro Olayemi Showunmi, her daughters, nieces and their children, her family

273
Shofolahan Akeem, interview with Erin Rice, Masallam Kampala/Adire Factory, Abeokuta,
Nigeria, March 3rd, 2014.
171
brought the adire dyeing business to Ijemo, the adire dyeing quarter of Abeokuta,
over 120 years prior. They sustained their business through the tumultuous decades
in the early 20th century when adire peaked and then went into steep decline. Today,
the family works in a similar manner to the adire production of the 19th and early 20th
centuries. The open-air compound stretches across several homes, bisected by a
narrow but busy road. Behind the homes the resist starch is applied with combs or
stencils, or the fabric is machine sewn. All of these methods produce patterns that
can quickly and easily fill the surface of an entire cloth. They are then dipped into
dye vats, and hung to dry in the sun on the roadside before several more dips in the
dye bath to reach the desired indigo hue. Finally, the starch resist is scraped off or
the stitches are pulled out to reveal a completed cloth that is folded, packaged and
sent to the nearby Itoku market (See figures 3.8, 3.9, 3.10).

The compound at Ijemo was producing common patterns that were neither time
consuming nor difficult to apply, but like Shofolahan’s new design, conveyed a sense
of continuity with the past. The combination of Nigerian cotton with well-recognized
Yoruba indigo patterns was something that had sustained the compound’s business
for over 120 years, and sticking to these local products was believed to be the key to
remaining profitable. More difficult patterns were still made there as well, but they
had to be requested ahead of time and could take months to complete. Showunmi,
the family matriarch, was working on a raffia alabere cloth that had taken 3 months
of labor to prepare it for the dye bath (figure 3.11). The white cotton fabric used by
the family was also of great importance. They dyed only on matte and brocade white
cotton from Kaduna in Nigeria’s north, reputed to be of the best quality because it
absorbed the dye well which helped produce colorfast fabrics.274

Shofolahan’s Factory and the adire compound at Ijemo represent a straddling of

industrial and handmade textile manufacturing, and as such, have defied
expectations of indigenous industry and the odds of success against Chinese and
other imports. Ijemo’s Iyaalaro Olayemi Showunmi was confident in the sustainability
of her compound because of the longevity of the adire industry in Abeokuta, and a
continuing interest by Nigerians in the adire textile. Shofolahan shared in her positive

274
Iyaalaro Olayemi Showunmi and several family members, interview with Erin Rice,
translation from Yoruba by Mike and Titi Omoighe, Ijemo, Abeokuta, March 3, 2014.
172
outlook, believing that the interest in unique, local, and handmade textiles would not
fade anytime soon.

If recent national trends in high fashion are any indication, both Shofolahan and
Showunmi are pioneers in their steadfast commitment to local products and designs.
The textiles they produce indicate a possible future for Nigerian manufacturing that
combine mass-produced raw materials with the distinction of local, hand-made
production. The fabrics also bring to mind the era of indigenous production sought by
purists at the same time that they are based on current and bespoke designs.

Aso-ebi’s expansion, a takeover of the textile markets by low-priced Asian imports

and smuggled goods, as well as the continued resiliency of the handmade
indigenous textile all have ramifications for the appropriation of textiles in Nigeria’s
contemporary art and contemporary fashion. As the last chapter discussed, the field
of indigenous textile design and production was intertwined with the burgeoning field
of modernist art, particularly within the experimental Zaria and Oshogbo groups.
Collaborations also came in more direct forms, such as the commissioning of
modernist artist Erhabor Emokpae to design an impression of Benin’s Oba
Erediauwa I for his coronation commemorative cloth printed by the UAC. 275 As
younger generations of artists have inherited the legacies of Oshogbo, Zaria, and
other pioneers, the fashion and art realm appear to have become far more
intertwined and at times indistinguishable as both designers and artists realize the
critical and conceptual potential of the textile and blur the lines between the
disciplines of art, design and fashion.

Common Threads: Interdisciplinary overlap between contemporary art and

fashion

In much the same manner that textiles like adire were reconceived in the 20th century
as “traditional” in order to highlight the modernity of works by artists working in the
60s and 70s, fashion designers have also turned to fabrics, beads, jewelry, and other
items associated with “traditional” African culture in order to imbue designs with a
specific or generalized African identity. Particularly as fashion designers from African
nations have brought their designs to global audiences, referents to specific cultures

275
Layiwola, “Royal Textiles of Benin,” 14.
173
or localities, or nods towards a more ambiguous idea of “Africa” have become
prevalent in high fashion. Bogolan, or mudcloth, for example, has been used to these
ends in the designs of Chris Seydou, a Malian fashion designer who brought this
emblem of traditional Malian culture to international fashion arenas through his
synthesis with contemporary couture.276 By contrast, as a way of identifying culturally
with Africa, African Americans have used Akan kente cloth, or rather a mass-
produced simulacrum of it, broadly and indiscriminately. So-called “kente print,”
which has been used to make everything from umbrellas to dashikis and handbags,
simply “conveys Africa” in a non-specific sense, and therefore has served as a
symbol of black pride for African Americans.277 Similar to kente, African prints, Dutch
waxes, batiks, and the like have appeared in high and mainstream fashion over the
last decade, signaling Africa without subscribing to a specific ethnic, national or
cultural identity. Especially for designers who were not African, such as Japanese
designer Junya Watanabe, printed textiles provided the fodder for his desire to re-
imagine Africa in the Japanese context. For designers of West African origins the
prints resonate personally and culturally while retaining a broad applicability.
Nigerian-born Duro Olowu, for example, uses ankara because it reminds him of his
childhood. It was the fabric his aunties from rural areas would wear and carry their
babies in. Though it was associated with village life, and with poor, illiterate people at
that time, ankara has undergone nothing short of a renaissance. In Oluwu’s words,
“it is the denim of West Africa.”278 Like modernist designers, Olowu integrates the
notion of synthesis into his designs, noting that African women tend to combine
‘traditional clothes’ with a Gucci scarf. He uses these seemingly offbeat
combinations as a platform for experimentation.279

276
See: Victoria L. Rovine, “Fashionable Traditions: The Globalization of an African Textile,”
in Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress, ed. Jean Allman (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 189–211.
277
Joseph K. Adjaye, “The Discourse of Kente Cloth: From Haute Couture to Mass Culture,”
in Language, Rhythm, & Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-First Century, ed.
Joseph K. Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1997), 33–35.
278
Funmi Odulate, “Into Africa,” Vogue, 2009, available at:
https://www.bellanaija.com/2009/02/vogue-celebrates-nigerian-ankara/ (accessed 4/9/2012).
279
Judith H. Dobrzynski, “Africa and Its Spheres of Influence,” The New York Times,
November 28, 2010, Sunday edition, sec. Art.
174
Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, designers and artists alike seemed to awaken
to the aesthetic possibilities of African print and their conceptual capacities as well.
The realities of life in Lagos, for instance, were integrated into the 2009 line of
clothing designed by Ituen Basi. At the time of a ban on the importation of foreign
fabrics in Nigeria, Basi utilized ankara scraps in designs that mismatched colors and
patterns in single pieces. The resulting patchwork effect inspired artist Peju Alatise’s
early fabric-based work.280 According to Basi’s website, the 2009 line “started a new
era of Ankara interpretation in Nigeria and Africa.”281 Since then, she has gone on to
expand upon ankara’s material possibilities and to integrate the line drawings of
artist Victor Ehikhamenor into custom-made fabrics for her 2014 line titled Ekemini.
That same year, Ehikhamenor produced a work titled “I Hope You Remember” of
enameled canvas that evokes the headscarf. The piece pays homage to the
headscarves worn by his mother, and thus serves as a link to her memory and role
in passing down cultural histories.282 Similarly, Kolade Oshinowo who was inspired to
start using textile scraps as a paint medium because his daughter was working as a
fashion designer, stepped over the threshold of high fashion through a collaboration
with Nigerian designer Tiffany Amber. In a collection titled “Rhapsody of Fashion &
Art” Amber used Oshinowo’s painting “Marketmood” to create a textile and a line of
full-length gowns out of it.283 The paintings were displayed side by side with the new
line of clothing at the release event.

If these collaborations between artists and designers are any indication of an

increased blurring of the boundaries between artistic and design practices, then the
menswear label Ikiré Jones may represent the completion of this process of
seamlessly integrating two forms. Born in Nigeria and based in the US, chief
designer and creative director Walé Oyéjidé, Esq. provides the artistic hook for the
label’s “international dandy” concept. With no formal education in fashion design, he

280
Peju Alatise, “Material Witness (Exhibition Catalogue),” ed. Dapo Akintunde (Nike Art
Gallery, March 2012), 18.
281
Ituen Basi “About Us” http://www.ituenbasi.co.uk/index.php/about-us (Accessed June 1,
2017)
282
Liz Bolshaw, “Victor Ehikhamenor: Shaped by Memory and Tribal Tradition,” Financial
Times, March 27, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/a3544b56-ce34-11e4-86fc-
00144feab7de?mhq5j=e2.
283
Dayo Adepoju, “BN Red Carpet Fab: Tiffany Amber Rhapsody of Art & Fashion Event,”
BellaNaija (blog), February 12, 2009, https://www.bellanaija.com/2009/12/bn-red-carpet-fab-
tiffany-amber-rhapsody-of-art-fashion-event/.
175
relies on his creative vision and tailor Samuel Hubler to execute it to the standards of
the label that seek to combine high quality Italian construction with African
aesthetics.284 Although once part of the young generation of designers that
experimented with the possibilities offered by African prints, Oyéjidé’s more recent
designs in silk have taken the notion of an ”African aesthetic” in a new direction.
Several of these new pieces have been included in a number of recent exhibitions
that have explored precisely this phenomenon of the overlap between design and
art, such as the “Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design” that began in
2015 at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany and will tour until 2019. Included in
this exhibition are a few samples from Ikiré Jones’ line of scarves and pocket
squares, which are smaller versions of his silk tapestries that immerse motifs from
diverse sources spanning Italian Renaissance painting to masterpieces of 16 th
century Benin court art with people of color that have passed unsung through history.
Through color and composition the silks resemble Italian renaissance paintings at
first glance, but closer inspection reveals that they are interventions on the Old World
Masters and the art historical canon they appear to mimic.285 Yet they are also
objects of beauty and luxury on their own, and are intended to be worn with an Ikiré
Jones bespoke suit.

Amaka Osakwe, founder of the fashion label Maki-Oh, has also skirted the line
between art and fashion, though she is much better known for her clothing designs.
Specifically, the Maki-Oh brand brought handmade adire oniko and eleko fabrics to
haute couture runways and to ready-to-wear lines through Osakwe’s transformative
contemporary aesthetic. Celebrities such as Michelle Obama, Lupita Nyong’o and
Solange Knowles have been seen wearing the adire lines, thus bringing the textile
into an international spotlight like never before.286 The adoption of the adire textile is
undoubtedly a strategy of connecting to Osakwe’s heritage not unlike the strategies
employed by other designers to place African fashion designs within specific

284
Poundo, “Prêt-À-Poundo: Ikiré Jones for The Western African and International Dandy,”
OkayAfrica (blog), May 10, 2013, http://www.okayafrica.com/photos/ikire-jones-fashion-
trends-menswear-west-african-prints/.
285
See: https://ikirejones.com/archive/
286
See http://issues.ayibamagazine.com/solange-knowles-in-maki-oh-at-bet-upfront-2015-
event-in-new-york/ (accessed Oct. 17, 2015);
http://www.bellanaija.com/2014/03/11/presenting-the-maki-oh-fall-2014-ready-to-wear-
collection-lookbook/ (accessed Oct. 17, 2015);
176
localities on the continent using certain materials. However, when those materials
are mass-produced, it suggests the designers’ commitment to cultural production is
merely lip service. Osakwe cites her cultural heritage as her biggest source of
inspiration and actively contributes to its continued production by using locally made,
locally sourced organic cotton and silk dyed in natural indigo.287

Supporting the producers living off making adire today not only contributes to the
sustainability of the practice, but assures Osakwe’s products are entirely produced in
Nigeria and benefitting Nigerian workers. This commitment to local labor and
production coincides with Osakwe’s knowledge of women’s work and struggles in
Nigeria’s history. Her designs reflect this knowledge of female production, as well as
the use of textiles to speak for women. Unlike with the appropriation of adire
patterns into modernist paintings, Osakwe re-imagines the textile within the sartorial
tradition of women’s wrappers in which it was borne. Her Fall 2014 ready-to-wear
line feature several ensembles honoring the wrappers and buba of colonial-era
clothing that combined indigenous and Victorian styles but ultimately came to
represent an anti-colonial sentiment in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. A wrap skirt from the
Autumn/Winter 2014 line embodies this history of communication. The blue and
white fabric is patterned with text in Yoruba language, a translation from three lines
of poem-like verse about a fictional female character looking at herself in the mirror
and speaking to her lover (figure 3.12). The design, both in the pattern as well as the
combination of a wrap skirt with a blouse, recall adire iro and buba with
commemorative text instead of graphics (figure 3.13).

Where Osakwe’s designs evoke history and memory through subtle means, her art
presents a more direct interaction with women’s history through the medium of cloth
and dress. “Nigeria at 50” is a multimedia installation that in addition to showing
Osakwe’s artistic side also makes known her knowledge of women’s history and
achievements in Nigeria’s modern era. Composed of several cuts of fabric, differing
in size, shape, color and texture, as well as a pair of sandals, “Nigeria at 50” pays
homage to important female figures from the first five decades of Nigeria’s
independence, such as Nike Okundaye, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and Buchi

Amelia Diamond, “Know Your Labels: Maki Oh,” Man Repeller (blog), November 22,
287

2013, http://www.manrepeller.com/2013/11/know-your-labels-maki-oh.html.
177
Emecheta, an influential writer, among others (figure 3.14). Her inclusion of
Ransome-Kuti may reference the early-20th century conditions of adire’s production
as highly dependent on imported cloth and dyes, a dependence that ultimately
implicated it in the political struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. It was at this time,
when Ransome-Kuti utilized dress as a tool of resistance and an expression of
defiance, opening the adire garment to new possibilities.

This installation together with her clothing designs reinforce the associations
between women, labor and textiles. Yet rather than using adire and its history as
cultural reference points, or a token acknowledgement of an ancient past or
“tradition,” Osakwe’s engagement with the textile is in fact part of a continuing
narrative whereby the fabric continues to be produced, and its uses continue to
evolve. As the person controlling that production and evolution, Osakwe asserts her
place amongst the women that have shaped culture and history. Pushing the
material to what might be viewed as new extremes, Osakwe plays with notions of
women, labor and textiles in her Spring/Summer 2012 promotional video that uses
streetwalkers as models for her line of apparel. One of those women wears a pair of
shorts made of adire. The shorts are cut very high, and the use of what is typically
viewed as a “traditional” textile as sexually alluring attire is provocative. At the same
time, it continues to be rooted in the experience of women and work and it evokes
the various levels of dress and undress that Nigerian women have elected in the
past as provocations. For example, women in the Niger Delta took naked to the
streets to demand the oil company compensate for the havoc it wreaked on the
Delta's people and natural environment. With nothing but their nudity, a serious
cultural taboo, the seemingly powerless women of communities where Shell and
Chevron operate all but brought the flow of oil to a halt.288 Osakwe's designs reorient
the textile in relation to the body in garments that conceal or reveal, and are informed
by the history of how, why, and by whom they were worn.

Beyond “Tradition”: Temitayo Ogunibiyi’s reinvention of adire

Similar to Osakwe, the practice of artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi presents new directions
for the adire textile in the 21st century that pay homage to the industry’s past while

288
Candace Schermerhorn, The Naked Option, Documentary, 2011.
178
defining its contemporaneity. For Lagos-based Ogunbiyi, the image of adire serves
as an apt departure point for her multi-media textile works, which fuse the history of
indigo dyeing in Yorubaland and technological innovation in a blending of form and
content. Yet, as much as her work draws on textile practices of the past, it also
demonstrates how acts of storytelling, commemorating, and memorializing have
changed across the globe in the age of social media. Using the well-established
association of adire and its more colorful “modern” variety kampala with the
capacities for communication and their connections to Nigeria’s cultural history,
Ogunbiyi weaves a contemporary tale of global interconnectedness while speaking
in the visual vernacular of textiles. In the setting of Lagos, a city that speaks fluently
in the pattern language of textiles while being simultaneously entrenched in the
newest communication technologies and media, Ogunbiyi uses the textile as the
vehicle through which she inserts herself and her appropriations of a popular adire
pattern in the trajectory of several centuries of indigo dyeing history, and in the
continual reinvention of the fabric’s role in contemporary Nigerian society.

Presented in London in 2012 during the Summer Olympics, Ogunbiyi’s Nigeria

House installation, Eagles Will Fly, featured two fabrics digitally designed and factory
printed with adire-inspired patterns that blended with images of famous soccer
players from Nigeria’s past (figure 3.15, 3.16). Soccer was a sensitive subject to
many at the time since the Nigerian national team, the Super Eagles, did not qualify
for the 2012 Olympics. By putting the faces on a fabric—many of whom are depicted
smiling or at a moment of jubilation—it is not the recent failures of the team that are
remembered, but the team at its best during moments of past victories. Like a
panegyric, the fabric brings together the triumphant moments of individual players in
order to construct an image of the Super Eagles fit for the long life of a
commemorative textile. Like the adire oloba and the many factory-printed
commemorative portrait cloths that have come before it, the subjects are
immortalized through a combination of photograph and fabric in the form of a pattern.

The soccer theme recalls a print cloth produced by the textile firm Sotiba following
the 1998 FIFA World Cup tournament in which a popular Senegalese singer,
Youssou N’Dour, sang the official anthem. Sotiba’s design integrated N’Dour’s image
within a repeating soccer ball motif that made obvious allusion to the event, but also
placed the musician in the position of the tournament’s star, instead of any of the
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game’s players from the French and Brazilian national teams.289 Undoubtedly, the
choice was motivated by the Senegalese company’s desire to sell to Senegalese
clientele, however it also speaks to the ability for a commemorative fabric to shape
cultural memory of a specific event through its imagery and design. In particular,
Sotiba’s design indicates how an international event is recast through the prism of
regional or cultural specificity. The significance of the 1998 World Cup for the
Senegalese was not who played or which team won, but rather, who sang the
anthem. Ogunbiyi’s cloth immortalizes the Super Eagles’ moments of glory, rather
than their recent defeat.

Memory, in both its personal and collective form, is a theme that permeates
Ogunbiyi’s work. Specifically, Ogunbiyi examines the modes and objects of human
memory, even as they have shifted in the recent decades to digital formats on social
media platforms. Born and raised in the United States to a Jamaican mother and a
Nigerian father, Ogunbiyi was aware from a very early age how the experience of
migration can lend meaning to physical objects and hold the memory of former
homelands or former lives. One of her earliest textile-based pieces was assembled
from cloth from Ogunbiyi’s mother’s wedding dress, and pieces of her father’s and
brother’s clothing in a patchwork homage to her family. The individual pieces of cloth
that comprised the piece would have significance for only those closest to the artist,
but as a whole tell a common story of love, marriage, migration, and family. These
processes of collecting and assembling are found in other works that serve a more
collective memory, rather than a personal one. She often takes objects from sites of
significance, such as a photo frame from post-Katrina New Orleans, and combines
them with other objects and her own drawings in a layering of meaning. In her textile
pieces, this process is repeated but the objects are digital rather than physical. Bits
of conversation from text messages, Facebook exchanges, tweets, or images from
her Blackberry display are collected and assembled into a composition that takes on
a kaleidoscopic effect once they are printed on plain cotton weave. In these pieces
both collective and personal memories are evoked, as the conversations concern
current events but are told through the digital communication from her network of
friends and family. In a final layering of meaning, the textiles are shipped over land or

289
Rabine, The Global Circulation of African Fashion, 151.
180
oceans, mimicking the patterns of human migration, and infusing the work with its
own stories and memories.

Part of the layered work that composed Eagles Will Fly was an adire cloth patterned
with a comb technique. This fabric, which was in addition to the commemorative
portrait style print featuring Super Eagles team members as well as pencil drawings
and other layered materials, situates Eagles Will Fly within a wider project called
Arodudu Reconstructed and Revisited (2012). The layering of this piece of fabric
solidifies the associations with adire dyeing that are only alluded to in the Super
Eagles digital print. Arodudu, which simply means to dye a dark color, refers to the
older repertoire of patterns at large. Ogunbiyi explains, “Since moving home to
Lagos in 2011, I have been interested in how, if at all, traditional techniques of textile
design might be combined with my digital textile printing to produce a hybrid
diachronic product. Separate from one another, both of these fabrics function as an
archive, denoting a particular moment or period in time.”290 This distinction between
the relevance of the fabrics when they are viewed separately and when they are
viewed together reveals the significance of each element of Ogunbiyi’s installations,
as well as her conception of her art and digital prints as a continuation of adire’s
historical narrative, rather than a mere reference to it.

This assertion of digital adire into the evolution and development of adire as a whole
is especially prevalent in Ogunbiyi’s 2014 installation for the OFF program of the
2014 Dak’Art Biennial (Figure 3.17, 3.18). Titled, "Elevator Chatter (Abeokuta to
Dakar)," Ogunbiyi installed a structure that evoked the elevator both spatially and
conceptually on the sidewalk outside the Maison D’Aissa Dione. The white,
unassuming, freestanding wooden structure could be accessed from the street and
entered through slim double doors. The interior was scarcely large enough to hold
two people at a time. Once inside, a kaleidoscope-like reworking of the adire oniko
pattern that was also part of the Nigeria House 2012 installation surrounded the
visitor. The floor, walls and ceiling were papered with the printed pattern. Small
pencil drawings of food the artist ate while in Senegal preparing the installation hung
from the walls, making a tiny intimate gallery of the “elevator” space and offering a
glimpse of the artist’s encounter with the city of Dakar. Some of the drawings were

290
Temitayo Ogunbiyi, captions for Arodudu Reconstructed and Revisited, 2012
181
held within the now empty food packaging, including a bar of French, organic
chocolate infused with aphrodisiac spices, a pack of Senegalese cashews, and a
bag of raisins on which the description of the contents is inscribed on the packaging
in seven languages. Some of the drawings indicate the date the food was
consumed, and some of the packaging still retains the price sticker in CFA. A paper
torn from the same sketchpad as the drawings hangs next to the door and indicates
the title of each drawing by number. The titles also offer dates and other clues
relating to the food sources and the artist’s experience. The first drawing of a muffin
asks “Where are my sisters?/Ou est mes…” and is titled “May 2: Arik Muffins for All”.
The inscription is likely a reference to the abduction of over 250 girls from a school in
Chibok, northern Nigeria by the Boko Haram terrorist group during the night of April
14-15, 2014. Arik Air is the airliner that services routes connecting Lagos to Dakar.
Another drawing of caramelized peanuts, its French-language packaging peeking out
from behind the sketch paper, is titled “May 7: Sticky Clusters, Groups, Trees, and
Thoughts of Sambisa,” a reference to the Sambisa forest where Boko Haram was
alleged to have held the victims of the kidnapping at its fortified camp. A drawing of a
corn-cob called “May 5: Guess the Kernels, Guess the Girls” dotted with numbers
ranging from 180 to 329 and each followed by a question mark relates the counting
of kernels on a cob to counting missing schoolgirls. The inability of the Nigerian
government, the media or any other authority to report a reliable or accurate number
of missing people is here reduced to the absurdity of a guessing game. Kernels on a
cob are hard to count because they all look the same and the round cob makes it
difficult to keep track of where counting starts and ends. The comparison is a simple
metaphor yet a biting critique of the Nigerian government’s handling of the crisis in
Chibok. In the weeks and months following the kidnapping, there was no information
released about the girls’ names, no photos to help identify them, no concerted effort
whatsoever to rescue them, prompting the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls which
spread internationally and seemed equally directed at the forces responsible for their
rescue as the ones responsible for their initial abduction.

Rooted in the recent experiences of the artist, these drawings referred to a wide
range of occurrences told from personal and public perspectives. From the mundane
act of snacking, to the international media coverage of Nigeria’s mass kidnapping,
the events are woven together by the itinerary of the artist, her location, travels,

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meals, purchases and her experiences of the collective as they filter through her
personal networks, social media feeds, and American or Nigerian news media
outlets. Underlying these more explicit references are the historical currents that
connect Dakar and Lagos and other parts of West Africa in a number of ways. For
one, although the wallpaper pattern is derived from a photograph of an adire oniko
cloth that the artist found in her father’s hometown of Abeokuta, its installation in the
city of Dakar serves as a reminder of the ancient origins of indigo dyeing that likely
migrated to or from the Dogon region of current day Mali to or from the coast to the
south. These vast land areas between the Sahelian and Coastal regions of West
Africa were also connected by trade routes and by semi-nomadic people such as the
Fulani, long before they were divided into colonies or nation states. References to
Arik Air, the artist’s journey from Lagos to Dakar, and the dated recordings of her
drawings with the leftover packaging from things she ate serve as a sort of
contemporary travelogue. Combined with the artist’s connection to the adire dyeing
town of Abeokuta, the installation marks a sort of repetition of migratory history of
objects and people over West African land. Finally, an art historical reference to the
Malian photographer Seydou Keita is embedded in the use of textile pattern as the
wallpaper to the interior. Keita’s portrait photography is best known for his use of
boldly patterned textiles as the backdrop to his subjects. With the adire oniko as the
backdrop, the connection is subtly reinforced, but also localized to the cultural
bearings of the artist.291

Within this imagined migration, the artist inserts her production and her actions into
the contemporary state of adire, while acknowledging the integral role of cross-
cultural and migratory movements in adire’s past in which female designers and
market sellers were the agents. Much in the way her hybrid textile in “Eagles Will
Fly…” brought together classic compositions with modern techniques and pattern
imagery to expose an ongoing development of the adire textile, an earlier work from
2012 took this migratory step in the making of an artwork a bit further. “Towards
Remembering 160-something” is an installation anchored by a textile pattern
designed by Ogunbiyi composed of messages of condolences sent via Blackberry

291
Temitayo Ogunbiyi, interview with Erin Rice, April 10, 2014 Lagos, Nigeria
183
Messenger, website commentaries, and emails concerning the Dana Air crash in
Lagos on June 3rd, 2012, in which an estimated 160 people died (figure 3.19).

Taking parts of digital conversations from the general public and part from her
private correspondences, Ogunbiyi constructed a history of the event through the
voices of people throughout the globe who were present in Lagos when the crash
took place, or were affected by it abroad. The fabric’s pattern utilizes the lapel ribbon
as a prominent motif, reiterating the commemorative purpose and function of the
textile. This function extends to the installation as a whole through a number of other
references to memory and mourning. In another section, the fabric is cut into small
squares and interspersed with plain white handkerchiefs that signify both the use of
a cloth to wipe away tears as well as the motions of Igbo dance performed at
funerals (figure 3.20).292 The work allows the textile to function as a “traditional”
textile in that it communicates, tells a story, and commemorates an event in a way
that operated both personally and universally. In this sense, the work serves as a
precursor to the Elevator Chatter (Abeokuta to Dakar) installation in the subtle
integration of the personal with the universal, the private with the public.

Towards Remembering also serves as a mirror on the artist's movement and

migration. Ogunbiyi designed the textile on her computer from her studio in Lagos. It
was then sent as a digital file to a printer in the United States. Once printed on fabric,
it was shipped from the U.S. back to Nigeria where it was brought to Oshogbo to
undergo kampala, a modernized version of tie-dye that uses synthetic, imported
dyes in a wide range of colors beyond indigo blue. The migratory pattern of the
textile from Nigeria to the U.S. and back to Nigeria mimics that of the artist and her
father, and once again serves to insert her work, particularly through the use of
digital printing and kampala dyeing, into the ongoing development of the adire textile.

Taken together—aso-ebi, commemorative and occasional prints, and the textile as

prop, garment, and backdrop for portrait photography—provide numerous
interconnected examples of how the textile is integrated in the process of
remembering. In the specific context of adire, the long history of an exclusively
female production for female consumption that changed only in the first quarter of

292
Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Towards Remembering 160-something, captions. Courtesy of the
artist.
184
the 20th century implicates the textile with multiple histories. The association of adire
with the feminine which was undermined by modernist appropriations of adire
patterns that ignored the agency of its producers is revived by contemporary
practices that utilize the fabric’s patterns, palette, history, and capacity for both
communicating and commemorating. Women working in fashion design today in
particular have demonstrated an interest in exploring the ways the feminine is
deployed within strategies of reclamation. Whereas Thomas-Fahm aligned dress
with political imperative, Osakwe embraced the adire textile’s relation to female
labor, histories and bodies, and reformats them into semi-autobiographical
narratives. Contemporary cultural producers have experimented with material
properties, the physical and aesthetic limitations, as well as the symbolic and
conceptual potential the textile holds within the rich contexts of dress and art in
Nigerian society.

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 CONCLUSION

The Past, Present and Future for Textiles in Contemporary Art in Nigeria

The results of this research show that artistic practices in Nigeria that appropriate
textile material or patterns have precedents in art movements and individual artworks
that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The connections between appropriative
practices of the 1990s to the 21st century and those of the Modern era have been
omitted from historical accounts and exhibitions, which has problematically
interpreted textile-based art to referencing the artists' African "roots" and crediting
them with the invention of an artistic genre that they inherited from earlier
generations. While the artistic output of Nigerian modernists has been understood as
having nationalist intentions, this thesis finds that these works often relied upon the
use of women's textile production that was inaccurately labeled as "traditional."
Notions of "tradition" served as a foil to the formation of a modern art and modern
identity, yet ample evidence of the co-existence and evolution of textile disprove its
"traditionality" or association with the past. In recent decades, the use of textiles in
art and cultural production has changed substantially as contemporary artists and
fashion designers, freed from the constraints of nationalism or colonialism, turn to
the textile as a critical, sometimes subversive tool to engage subjects of national and
global relevance.

In light of these findings on adire, dress, and its appropriation into art of the modern
and contemporary eras, the significance of the uniform change in Lágbájá’s music
video for his song ‘Never Far Away’ becomes evident. The orchestra’s simple
change of clothes embodies the popular and growing practice of aso-ebi, as well as
the complex history of indigo dyeing in Yoruba culture that was implicated in the
political and economic landscapes of the 19th and 20th centuries. The choice of adire
over the Western style suit and dress alludes to the evolution of dress that witnessed
the indigenous textile go from a peasant’s cloth to a powerful rejection of colonialism
and Victorian culture. Worn collectively, the fabric represents national, ethnic and
cultural identity as much as it serves to unite members of an orchestra, a family or
community. As the modern history of adire illustrated, 20th century indigo dyeing was
hardly the “traditional” indigenous production it once was. Instead, like Lágbájá’s
synthesis in music, adire was transformed through contact with foreign technologies

186
and foreign visual culture that was acculturated through its pattern language, and
revolutionized through adaptations to contemporary life by artists, designers,
playwrights, tailors, and adire producers.

This project began with the question: is there a precedent in Nigeria for textile-based
art? The question was inspired by the noteworthy presence of textiles in artworks
circulating in European and American art institutions in the 1990s and 2000s under
the terms “African,” “Global” and “African Diaspora” art. Many of these artists were
not living on the African continent, yet were producing work that was categorized
under the “African” label. Some of these artists had ties to Nigeria, and using the
textile medium or visual language was a popular way to relate the work to their
“Africanness,” which motivated the project’s initial inquiry. Several years and a great
deal of research later, the answer to that question is a definitive “yes.” However, as
the three main chapters that comprise this dissertation demonstrate it is hardly a
simple yes, but rather a complex interconnected web of answers that implicates
Western art history, textile production, and curatorial practice.

By looking at the confluence of art and textiles from several different angles but with
a strict focus on Nigerian art and printed textiles, this dissertation fills a scholarly gap
and addresses some issues within current scholarship regarding gender and textile
media. The areas where textiles and arts overlapped in the context of Nigeria
provided the cornerstone for the argument that Western biases towards textiles and
the cultural production of women shaped the reception of this specific genre of
contemporary art. This was in part achieved through an examination and critique of
the curatorial, academic and global artistic phenomena that have shaped the
discourses of textiles, textile-based arts, and West African arts.

While situating Nigeria's modern art into a broader global and interdisciplinary scope,
this study took focused and careful looks at the specific context and time-frame of
pre-Independence Nigeria’s adire textile industry and the Modern art movement that
developed between roughly 1920 – 1970. An in-depth look at the processes and
forces underlying the modernization of adire production challenged its perception as
“traditional” culture that persists today. The intention of adire’s inclusion in works by
the Zaria Art Society artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, and later, Mbari Mbayo club
members and Oshogbo group artists was to both root the work in a local, Yoruba

187
vernacular, while highlighting the modernity of the artwork against which adire’s
traditionality was set in contrast.

While artistic appropriation is interpreted through adire’s specific involvement in

political affairs, technological developments, women’s rights and other forms of
protest, the research into other textile-related phenomena that shaped and
influenced the decisions of both visual artists and fashion designers to work with
indigenous or factory produced fabrics highlights the ways this artistic genre has
changed substantially since the days of Shonibare, Anatsui and their
contemporaries. The trajectories of 20th century sartorial customs such as aso-ebi,
and interrelated practices such as commemorative and portrait cloth, photography,
owambe, and new competitors on the international textile market have replaced the
older generation’s concerns for nationalism and ethnicity in the work of younger
artists using textiles as both conceptual and material tools. Subversion and critique
shift from the tools of the colonial subject to the Nigerian artist at large in his or her
individual quest against consumerism, capitalism, patriarchy, and other forces.

Above all, adire, in its physical, symbolic and historic manifestations is proven to
persist in the 21st century as it did through the tumult of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Carrying on in its own evolution, adire remains an opportune material for re-invention
and re-imagination at the hands of creative people. Beyond the creative practices of
artists and designers, the textile underpins all aspects of everyday life. Its ubiquity,
persistence, deep symbolism and rich history suggest that the practices analyzed
here represent perhaps only the beginning and only a portion of the extraordinary
aesthetic and conceptual potential of the textile.

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 IMAGES

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 A selection of texts illustrating a preference for strip-woven cloth, especially Ewe kente, for the
cover image. Photo by the author.

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Figure 1.2 Installation view of Abdoulaye Konaté Gris-Gris Blancs at Blain Southern in Berlin February
2015. Photo courtesy of Francis Mobio

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Figure 1.3 Aso-oke handwoven cloth in cotton and Lurex, collection of Elisha Renne. Reproduced from
Barbara Plankensteiner, Eine Geschichte des Handels, der Kreativität und der Mode in Nigeria, (Ghent;
Snoeck, 2010), 78.

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Figure 1.4 Obinna Makata, “Pregnant in the Belly” 2012, Ink and fabric on paper, 26.5 x 35.5 cm.
Reproduced from: “Obinna Makata: Metahistories” (African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), Lagos, 2012)
Exhibition catalogue.

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Figure 1.5 Kolade Oshinowo “Engagement,” 2011, mixed media painting, 80x154 cm. Photo by the
author.

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Chapter 2

Figure 2.1 Bruce Onobrakpeya, “Uli,” 1970, bronzed lino relief, 102cm x 76.2cm. Reproduced from Darah
and Quel, Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Spirit in Ascent (Lagos: Ovuomaroro Gallery, 1992) 148.

194
Figure 2.2 Adire cloth in Olokun pattern, Yoruba woman’s wrapper, indigo dye on cotton, acquired in
Ibadan, Nigeria in 1971, date of production unknown, 196cm x 176 cm, ©Trustees of the British Museum

195
Figure 2.3 Bruce Onobrakpeya, “Obioko II (The Boatman),” 1983, Plastograph 32.7 x 23.5 cm. Reproduced
from jegede, Onobrakpeya, Masks of the Flaming Arrows (2014) pg. 101.

196
Figure 2.4 Bruce Onobrakpeya, “Zaria Indigo,” 1965, oil painting on board 102 x 76 cm, collection of Prof.
J.P. and Ebun Clark. Reproduced from: jegede, Masks of the Flaming Arrows, (2014) pg. 124.

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Figure 2.5 Hand-painted and stenciled Adire Oloba celebrating the Silver Jubilee of King George V. Indigo
dye on cotton. Date unknown. ©Trustees of the British Museum

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Figure 2.6 Yoruba language newspaper announcing Jubilee Celebration of King George V and Queen
Mary from May 11, 1935. Photograph by the author with permission from National Archives, Ibadan

199
Figure 2.7 Adire oloba, Diko compound, Abeokuta. Collection of the Smithsonian Institute. From:
https://africa.si.edu/collections/view/objects/asitem/items$0040:11913

200
Figure 2.8 King Edward VIII Adire Oloba (detail) Reproduced from Goode and King AH! This Nigeria!!: A
collection of Expatriate Memories (2008) 31. Original photo by Helen Travers

201
Figure 2.9 Bruce Onobrakpeya, “Nativity II,” lino engraving, 1978. Image courtesy of Bruce Onobrakpeya
Foundation.

202
Figure 2.10 Bruce Onobrakpeya, “Have you Heard?,” ca. 1970, serigraph on paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm. From:
http://www.gafraart.com/artists/25-bruce-onobrakpeya/works/25/ (accessed 1.7.17)

203
Figure 2.11 Tijiani Mayakiri and Duro Ladipo on stage during Ladipo’s Oba Moro at the Mbari Mbayo
Club, Oshogbo in 1962. Reproduced from Ulli Beier, Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art, (1991) pg. 41, Photo by
Nina Fischer.

204
Chapter 3

3.1 “A mother and her son, October 1st, 1960” http://nigerianostalgia.tumblr.com/post/42228675219/a-

mother-and-her-son-oct-1st-1960-more-vintage (accessed 1.7.2017)

205
Figure 3.2 Adire Kaftan by Folashade Thomas Fahm. From Thomas-Fahm, Faces of She (2004) 79.

206
Figure 3.3 Kelani Abass “Asiko 2 (Family album series),” 2013, diptych, corrugated cardboard, laminated
print and acrylics on canvas, 91x122x6 cm, each. Photo by the author.

207
Figure 3.4 Ayo Akinwande “赢得 – Win,” 2017, (From top left) “Filà,” Resin cast coral beads, plastic
helmet, 45x25x18 cm; “Àwòtélè,” Texts on used and machines-sewn cement sacks, 91x132 cm.;
“Àwòsókè,” used and machine-sewn cement sacks, aluminum, N5 naira notes, 118 x 147 cm. Photos
courtesy of the artist.

208
Figure 3.5 Vlisco brochure “See: A Vision of Beauty” from last season of 2015. Photo by author.

209
Figure 3.6 An apprentice applies wax resist with a stamp at the studio of Akeem Shofolahan, Masallam
Kampala Adire Factory, Abeokuta, Nigeria, March 2014. Photo by the author.

210
Figure 3.7 Detail of cloth with cowrie shell motif. Photo by the author.

211
Figure 3.8 Adire cloths drying on outdoor racks and on the roadside at an adire factory in Ijemo,
Abeokuta, March 2014. Photo by the author.

212
Figure 3.9 Removing the thread from a sewn-patterned adire at the Ijemo factory, Abeokuta March 2014.
Photo by the author.

213
Figure 3.10 Scraping the resist substance off a newly dyed stenciled adire. Ijemo, Abeokuta, March 2014.
Photo by the author

214
Figure 3.11 Iyaalaro Olayemi Showunmi with an un-dyed adire alabere she was working on. Ijemo,
Abeokuta, March 2014. Photo by the author.

215
Figure 3.12 From the Maki-Oh Autumn/Winter 2014 collection, source: http://makioh.com/# (accessed
1.7.17)

216
Figure 3.13 Woman in commemorative adire-style iro, buba, gele, Lagos 2014. Photo by the author.

217
Figure 3.14. Maki-Oh “Nigeria at 50,” 2010, mixed-media installation. Source: www.makioh.com (accessed
1.7.17)

218
Figure 3.15 Temitayo Ogunbiyi “Eagles Will Fly as We Glide in the Sky and Hope to Walk on Water” 2012,
Drawings on paper, canvas, adire, and digital textile print on window mesh, fluorescent light bulb, Murray
Melvin Foyer, Nigeria House mixed media installation. Photo courtesy of the artist.

219
Figure 3.16 Temitayo Ogunbiyi, “Eagles Will Fly as We Glide in the Sky and Hope to Walk on Water” 2012,
(detail). Photo courtesy of the artist.

220
Figure 3.17 Temitayo Ogunbiyi, "Elevator Chatter (Abeokuta to Dakar)" 2014, Interior view of multimedia
installation, Maison D'Aissa Dione, Dakar. Photo by the author.

221
Figure 3.18 Temitayo Ogunbiyi, "Elevator Chatter (Abeokuta to Dakar)" 2014, Exterior view of multimedia
installation, Maison D'Aissa Dione, Dakar. Photo by the author.

222
Figure 3.19 Temitayo Ogunbiyi, “Towards Remembering 160-Something” 2012, printed cotton textile
before kampala tie-dyeing (top) and a detail after (bottom) as part of a multimedia installation at Nigeria
House, Theatre Royal, London. Photos courtesy of the artist.

223
Figure 3.20 Temitayo Ogunbiyi, detail of multimedia installation “Towards Remembering 160-Something”
2012, Nigeria House, Theatre Royal, London. Photo courtesy of the artist.

224
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 APPENDIX

Table of Nigerian and Nigeria-based artists that have worked with textiles as
subject or medium

Artist Name Type of Work

Paintings with photo transfer of family in aso-ebi, also

Abass, Kelani uses indigo like blue hue in many works

Adeyemi, Yinka Batik on rice paper, tapestry, part of Oshogbo group

Uses alternative materials to recreate indigenous styles

Akinwande, Ayorinde of clothing

Alakije, Jide Photography of weddings incl. documentation of aso-ebi

Alatise, Peju Layering of ankara fabrics in 2 and 3-D

Anatsui, El "Metal tapestry"

Dike, Ndidi Aso-oke inspired designs in mixed-media

Uses fabrics scraps in assemblage and 3D found object

Dilomprizulike (Junkman) works

Sculpture and painting with ankara and indigenous

Edozie, George fabrics

Enameled canvas gele, and collaboration with fashion

Ehikhamenor, Victor designers

Painting, often featuring women wearing wrappers, gele,

Essien, Nsikak with adire-like or other patterning

Fabunmi, Adebisi Oshogbo Group, yarn on muslin, printing on muslin

Wax batik under Wenger, representations of Yoruba

Gbadegesin, Sangodare deities

Grillo, Yusuf Uses adire blue palette

Jawando, Seni Acc to pat oyelola he was a batik artist

Lawal, Ibrahim Adebayo Appliqué, embroidery

Makata, Obinna Drawing utilizing fabric scraps

Odunlade, Tunde protégée of Oshogbo artists

Adire inspired, material and conceptual, digital print

Ogunbiyi, Temitayo textiles

Painter whose subjects range from women in aso-ebi,

Ogundipe, Moyo gele, to folkloric imagery, with pattern-like surface

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Okediji, Moyo Use of adire inspired patterning in painting

Mixed media sculptor, incl. fabric, and cloth-like

Okore, Nnenna constructions, studied under Anatsui.

Batik, painting and pen and ink with adire motifs,

Okundaye, Nike embroidery

See Oyelola “Picture and Pattern” Jean Kennedy African

Oladepo, Kikelomo arts 1971

Acc. To Pat Oyelola she was the first to create decorative

Oloyede, Senabu (Zeinab) batiks in Oshogbo. See Jean Kennedy 1971 African Arts

Omolowo, Toyin Aso-oke designs in mixed media

Onobrakpeya, Bruce Uses adire patterns in paintings and prints

Photography series of Yoruba Orisha portraits, focus on

Opara, Adolphus their attire

Painting utilizes fabric scraps (factory print types) as

Oshinowo, Kolade media, and

Photography featuring portraits of Nigerian monarchs in

Osodi, George full regal attire

Owolabi, Tunde Photos, painting, sound, installation using aso-oke

Udondian, Victoria Uses scrap fabrics in 3D work

Wenger, Susanne Batik

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Publications List

(2020) “But Them Can’t Be God: Chinese Textiles in Nigerian Dress and the Art of
Ayo Akinwande” Artl@s Bulletin: Vol. 9 No. 1 Article 5.
(2015) “Patterned Identity: Textiles and Traces of Modernity in Contemporary
Nigerian Art” Identitäten / Identities: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven (Heidelberg, DE:
Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg) 169-189.
(2014) “Patterned Modernity: The Role of Women in the Production of Textiles and
Contemporary Art in Nigeria.” FKW Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und
Visuelle Kultur, No. 57, 86-99.

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Summary of Results / Kurzfassung der Ergebnisse

The findings show that artistic practices in Nigeria that appropriate textile material or
patterns have precedents in art movements and individual artworks that emerged in
the 1960s and 1970s. The connections between appropriative practices of the 1990s
to the 21st century and those of the Modern era have been omitted from historical
accounts and exhibitions. While the artistic output of Nigerian modernists has been
interpreted as having nationalist intentions, this thesis finds that these works often
relied upon the use of women's textile production that was sometimes inaccurately
labeled as "traditional." Notions of "tradition" served as a foil to the formation of a
modern art and modern identity, yet ample evidence of the co-existence and
evolution of textile disprove its "traditionality" or association with the past. In recent
decades, the use of textiles in art and cultural production has changed substantially
as contemporary artists and fashion designers turn to the textile as a critical,
sometimes subversive tool to engage subjects of national and global relevance.

Meine Forschungsergebnisse betreffend Nigeria zeigen, dass sich heutige

künstlerische Praktiken, die sich textile Materialien und Muster zu eigen machen,
ihren Ursprung bereits in Kunstbewegungen und individuellen Arbeiten der 1960ern
und 1970ern haben. Die Verbindungen zwischen Appropriations-Praktiken der
Zeitgenössischen und der Moderen Kunst sind im historischen und
Ausstellungsaspekt häufig zu nicht beachtet worden. Die Werke von
zeitgenössischen nigerianischen Künstlern werden häufig als nationalistisch
interpretiert. In meiner Dissertation habe ich jedoch zeigen können, dass sich diese
Arbeiten wiederkehrend auf Textil Produktionen von Frauen, die fälschlicherweise
als “traditionell” bezeichnet werden, beziehen. Die Verwendung des Begriffes
“Tradition” wurde als Gegenpunkt zur modernen Kunst und Identität verstanden.
Jedoch zeigen sich klare Beweise, dass sich diese “traditionelle” Textilen fortlaufend
entwickelt haben und mit der zeitgenössischen Kunst koexistieren. In den vergangen
Jahrzehnten haben Künstler und Modedesigner den Gebrauch von Textilien in der
im Kunst- und Kulturbetrieb grundlegend verändert. Textilien sind nunmehr kritische,
oftmals subversive Werkzeuge um nationale und globale Inhalte zu vermitteln.

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Curriculum Vitae

Erin M. Rice received a B.A. from Providence College in 2006 and a Masters degree
in art history from Tufts University in 2010. Her dissertation, written first at the
University of Bern in Switzerland and completed at the Free University, Berlin, was
supported under the Sinergia project “Other Modernities” funded by the Swiss
National Science Fund (SNSF). She has worked at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston,
the Tufts University Art Gallery, and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. She
has taught art history courses at several universities in the United States, as well as
for the Goethe Institute and Leuphana University in Germany.

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