NSUKKA ART:
TOWARDS A CRITICAL
DISCOURSE
Barthosa Nkurumeh
THE PREAMBLE
My homage to whom?.
My lyrics to the
Igbo uli women folks who have sustained the uli art form?
My reverence to a
bird or to the Word that worded Asele, the bird?
As we wait for uli
inks to be commercially available for global use, my deference, my respect
to Uche Okeke for those seven decades of reassuring footprints on the gritty
sands of our history.
Uche Okeke's mother
is an uli artist, in broad context of the word, "artist. My mother is
not an uli artist but paints in uli. Since my childhood years,
she has been deploying uli pigments on people's bodies to bring their
ailing joints back to life. There was still an uli plant by the
entrance to her home in Amaimo, Awo-Idemili, the last time I visited. There
has always been one around the house. The presence of the tree is not for
the shade it provides, or the aesthetics of its being. It is for this reason
of therapy.
When I enrolled in
the art program at Nsukka during the 1982/83 academic year, Uche Okeke was
on the verge of retirement. Not very long, he did. He gave up his work as
the Director of the Institute of African Studies, and active teaching at the
art department, to continue work on the Asele Institute at Nimo. I was not
directly a student of his. I never had that privilege. I certainly would
have liked to. However, I studied his drawings during my graduate degree
years at Nsukka. They had such a significant impact on my work that El
Anatsui once made an avowal about that, and may marginally still be so.
I worked with Chuka
Amaefuna for the decade of incubation I spent at Nsukka. I had the
concession, the honour to work with Chike Aniakor. We all did (and I still
do) respect the dexterity, and the fluidity of his higher order cognitive
facilities. We, or a generation before us, entitled him a 'verbal painter".
Obiora Udechukwu was also a pathfinder whose trails illuminated the ways for
many of us assuming artisthood at that time. There were yet other
individuals whose prescience and proclivity helped shape the Nsukka art
culture. In honesty, as I am resolute, they deserve recognition as we
dialogue on the Nsukka art world.
As Okeke stated
during my interview with him at Asele Institute within the first quarter of
1992, there was never a time anyone said: let us start Nsukka uli
culture; it was the success of those working in the uli mode. It was
the predisposition, the consequence of the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War, and
the productivity of some of the postwar generation of the art faculty (and
the students as well) that truly brought Igbo cultural base to the Nsukka
art department. These are my annotations; these are my findings. Until
critical analyses of individual artists of the school are conducted; until
constructive writings on Nsukka School art traditions are executed, all
there are, are describable as "homages".
Prof. Barthosa Nkurumeh
Department of Art,
Middle Tonnesse State University,
Murfreesboro, USA.
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