Professor Moyo Okediji is a Nigerian painter, theorist and educator gifted with the words, colours and shapes to tell of his experiences in no less attractive way. This much he has done with his latest painting entitled “Ogunnic Exploits”, which will be shown at the Gantt Centre for African American Art at Charlotte, North Carolina, US from July to September 2015.more...
“Ogunnic Expoits” was conceived since 1992 and started out as a sketch on a painting turned up-side down. The rhythm of the painting structurally takes its tapestry from Fela’S song “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense”. As a receptacle of deep emotions, the artist unleashes the identity, belief and understanding he has of the African culture, which he thinks unwise to denigrate. It also elaborates on the liberation theme of Wole Soyinka’s epic poem “Ogun Abibiman”, which derives from the anti-apartheid activism of Southern Africa.
Moving to present-day struggle within cultural contradictions, “Ogunnic Exploits” still finds a connection saddled with a message of hope decades after the exit of the colonizers have left poisons of low or no self esteem, poverty, foreign religions, nepotism and insensitivity to human rights which has continued to haunt the ex-colonies.
The colours of the painting are symbolic of revolutionary valour, with bright and dark spaces to versify the changing terrains of multiple dimensionality of Ogun. Ogun, the deity of creativity and destruction, is pictured riding a horse across the landscape of Africa to engage the forces of negative powers entrenched in contemporary culture. “Ogunnic Exploits” is a visual African apae of Ogun, a force of liberation in the composition. “Everything begins from basic colour symbolism of thinking that dark is evil and white holy. Such is a self-destructive cultural notion, because when I look at my skin, I know I am dark and good,” he says.
The only Black member of the Africobra, the most enduring group of black artists in the United States, needs no inspiration to write or paint. He has to his credit a number of books, which bother on African arts and studies.
A typical day for professor Moyo is fluid, no rituals. He spends hours preparing for each class. He enjoys working in clay. He taught in the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, from 1978 to 1992, before relocating to the United States to become a professor of Art and Art History at the University of Texas, Austin, in the United States. He is also the Director of the centre for art of Africa and its Diasporas at the same University.
Not mincing words, he clearly attests to Africans being some of the most creative artists in the world. Depression, trauma and injuries, he says, are items that fuel a burning passion for Africans. However, he does not hide his disappointment about the lack of understanding of the black culture by Blacks. “It results from what I call the post traumatic slave disorder (PTSD) .We have not yet healed from the trauma of the European Invaders; we, therefore, move around sheepishly like people on drugs, saying ‘yes sir’ and ‘yes ma’ to any culture from people with lighter skin colours. Until we heal from the PTSD trauma, we will continue to sleep walk as a people.”
With experience spanning over 30 years, Moyo reveals he no longer sees the human body the same way people typically see it. “The female body is just a canvas. Even if I experience natural curiosity and pleasure at touching the body as I paint it, I cannot sexualize it, other wise, I couldn’t concentrate.”
In the 1970s, as a student in Nigeria, he trained to cultivate a high level of artistry and, by hard work, has written the following books, African Renaissance: Old Forms, New Images in African Art, Western Frontiers of African Art, and Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art.
For ten years, he was the curator of African and Oceanic arts at the Denver Art Museum. He has taught at various colleges in the United States, including Wellesley College, Gettysburg College, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Colorado at Denver. He has also exhibited at various places, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, the Corcoran Centre, London, and the National Museum Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria.
Culled from The Sun newspaper (written by Olamide Babatunde)
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