nigerian-women-artists

"Creative thinking and art are not measurable since they're testimony of the truth and inherent in all that exists. And this truth, the only truth, has many faces. Who can count the faces of truth? All religion are ultimately the religion of mankind. Art is ritual."

"The veil of taboo and language scepticism lays itself over the works that are free from materialism and empty transcendence."

"“serve life in a life-enhancing way”"

""It doesn't matter what you call it. It is a sacred force that represents the experience of life that informs human beingness."

"‘If Diane’s purpose was the intrigue and open the reader’s mind to Oshun, then she’s done a spectacular job as I’m now hungry for more learning on the subject’"

"‘There’s something incredibly effortless and beautiful about the way Esguerra writes’"

"‘Diane Esguerra is a very fine writer’"

"And as with all religions, there is no true way to explain it along rational lines without leeching it of its meaning and intensely personal quality. You are a part of it and it is a part of you. You may, as so many have done, push it aside, but it remains in you…in all of us."

"“Information is one of the greatest currencies in Lagos,” Dike says."

"“Teeming spaces and troubled vision make good fiction for thinking.”"

"“I feel accomplished having gotten my kids to do the better part of their school work!”"

""TEMITAYO OGUNBIYI AND HER PLAYFUL VISIONS FOR NAPLES - THISDAYLIVE". www.thisdaylive.com. Retrieved 21 March 2025."

"“create interactive sculptures that collapse the divide between fine art and play spaces”"

"“I found that as a foreigner, embarking on this project with little knowledge of the local culture, it was easier for me to find value in what is available locally, especially because much of what I encountered was new to me. At the same time, I enjoyed integrating my memories of Lagos – histories of threaded hairstyles and plants, with these Italian references. In the end, I learned quite a bit and hope that I was able to begin a dialogue between these two cities.”"

"“One of the things that I find most compelling about Tayo’s studio work is its engagement with circulation systems: the way in which products, ideas and images circulate in a global marketplace. … What Tayo says about circulation in her art — that it isn’t seamless or neat and that it can involve rupture, violence or misrecognition — speaks eloquently to the difficulty, even perversity, of defining or knowing identity (national as well as individual) in the 21st century.”"

"“Her work considers both the overt and conscious as well as the unconscious or surreptitious categorizations that define and propel the fate of art in multiple contexts: institutions, the marketplace and the academy,”"

"“Systems that capture, mediate, and direct the movement of people and matter is a recurring subject of investigation in her practice,”"

"“A curious observer of the world around her, Ogunbiyi crafts forms that indirectly suggest the need for protective spaces that nurture.”"

"“The artist is the one who has to mend the fragments for them to make sense,”"

"“To fill a lagoon with a bottle of wine, without money etc… this is a miracle,”"

"“Information is hidden and buried; it is inaccessible to the people and only permitted to those in power.”"

"“We aim to speak to the art world in their language, much of the time,”"

"Together we are our better selves"

"Our love embraces and sets free the best that is in us now and in the future"

"“I think and know that religion is not race-specific,”"

"From the minute I sit down to the minute I wrap up for the day, I stay with my headphones on, even if no one is around. It's always music, but today it was Quadron's album, Avalanche"

"Ink and graphite. Photo transfers and glitter. For the most part, my material notices are very analogue. Drawing can be many things, but for me still incorporates a pencil on paper. All of my supplies can fit in my tote bag."

"In every studio, I always cover the table with brown kraft paper. It's partly to protect the drawing but also so I can have somewhere to scribble down words (which i love almost as much as I love drawings)"

"“And yet, we also exist to reach those not in the art world, the tourists and passersby who might be intrigued by the playfulness and color. We’re trying to draw them in.”"

"“This is a period of their lives filled with awkwardness and bodily insecurity. In engaging with them, we can explore resistance and resolution through those bodies.”"

"That’s what it means to be an artist, for me, listening to the land and letting the land tell the stories."

"I think regions are strong when they maintain strong cultural ties to their past and thus a powerful sense of self. Cultural power leads to other forms of power. So for me culture comes first, and contemporary art is a tool and strategy to uncover the past and develop cultural capital."

"I do not consider myself an activist and never will. I hope nothing happens to me that forces me to engage on a single issue."

"It's beholden upon storytellers, whether they are in the media or museum world, to tell deeper stories and to provide a point of connection, and that kind of hasn't really been happening. That’s because you need contemporary artists to go there and (for the institution to) be comfortable with a certain level of subjectivity."

"The fact that (the mask) was heavy was important — I saw information in that. This idea that, here is this material that’s petroleum-based, and I liked the poetry of how it has kind of prevented performance, but that they also look sugary. But the cost is so much more (than the traditional wooden masks). And they also make beautiful pictures quite frankly!"

"Assemblies are portals where...flora is alive. I am introducing a West African cultural approach to alcohol consumption which is ritual, medicinal, mindful and moderate. My Assemblies are an opportunity to explore the very idea of ‘spirit’. The history of distilled spirits is alchemical and to me occupies a very powerful nexus at which spirituality and science meet...And the events do feel spiritual but they’re also very warm, rigorous and engaging. It is social medicine."

"I am interested in this idea of what your perception is and what the reality of material is and what it can become. You realize how materials can relate to what our memory has registered. What happens if we play with that memory — try to break that perception and rediscover the material? If you touch it or smell it, it breaks our preconceived ideas of what it is."

"Humans are only a small, minute part of the ecosystem, but we as beings have forgotten this."

"Your ancestors are part of your life in the present, and they are also the ones who show you the way into the future."

"I don’t like the word “sustainable”, I never did. The whole system has to change."

"I wasn’t expecting this (winning the Nasher Prize for Sculpture), but I am extremely honored."

"A young generation will be able to consider the planet we live in and find ways of repair, connection and love.”"

"I think that everybody has, I hope, or tries to in this lifetime, tries to have a passion of something that you wake up in the morning and and you feel motivated by. You feel that it's necessary for it to be in this world and when we don't find that quest, and when we do not know, it leads to many Questions of existence."

"I'm very interested in the microscopic and the general, and how those two things intersect and play roles and expand our understanding of what we are."

"The work of Otobong Nkanga makes manifest the myriad connections — historical, sociological, economic, cultural and spiritual — that we have to the materials that comprise our lives."

"Otobong Nkanga maps urgent global problems but does so in subtle, enigmatic, and probing ways. She works with materials that draw on many different aspects of the world's resources, and the complex histories of those materials are embedded in her works. The intense and productive way in which she presents formal and material questions is what marks out her huge contribution to sculpture right now."

"Nkanga's work makes clear the essential place of sculpture in contemporary life."

"Nkanga’s work harnesses sculpture’s capacity to embody experience; uses the Earth’s raw materials to incite feelings such as belonging, nostalgia, retrospection—through objects, through performance, through textiles, drawing, painting, poetry. She affects her audience, while suddenly addressing issues of consumption, globalism, connectivity, and more."

"The prize (Nasher Prize) is awarded to an artist for body of work, for a trajectory, for some sense of promise, for an ability to move the language of sculpture forward, as I think Otobong does, in a very exciting way."

"Nkanga is broadening the concept of sculpture to be a sculpture about the anthropology of materials. Her work has so many trajectories embedded in it, from Arte Povera to tropical architecture."