Art movement · Nigeria
The Oshogbo (Osogbo) School
The Oshogbo (or Osogbo) School is a group of Nigerian artists who emerged from experimental workshops held between 1962 and 1966 at the Mbari Mbayo club in Osogbo, a Yoruba town in south-western Nigeria. Largely without formal art training, they drew on Yoruba mythology and performance and became internationally known, among them Twins Seven-Seven, Jimoh Buraimoh, Muraina Oyelami and Nike Okundaye.
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A club in Osogbo
In 1962 a club called Mbari Mbayo opened in Osogbo, a Yoruba town known for the sacred grove of the river goddess Osun. It was a meeting place for theatre, music and visual art, created with the playwright Duro Ladipo and the German scholar Ulli Beier, who had been organising similar Mbari clubs in Ibadan.
Between 1962 and 1966 the club hosted a series of short workshops run by visiting artists, notably the British artist Georgina Beier. Participants — many of them actors from Ladipo's theatre company or young people from the town — were given materials, space and encouragement, but no academic instruction.
What came out of it
The workshops produced artists with highly individual styles that all draw on Yoruba stories, gods, festivals and everyday life:
- Twins Seven-Seven, who arrived at the club in 1963 and became one of Nigeria's best-known painters, with intricate, patterned images of spirits and myths;
- Jimoh Buraimoh, who developed painting with beads, an adaptation of Yoruba beadwork;
- Muraina Oyelami, a painter and also a celebrated drummer;
- Rufus Ogundele, Jacob Afolabi and Adebisi Fabunmi, painters and printmakers;
- Nike Okundaye (Nike Davies-Okundaye), who became a leading textile artist and founded art centres and galleries in Osogbo, Lagos and elsewhere.
Susanne Wenger and the sacred grove
The Austrian artist Susanne Wenger, who lived in Osogbo and became a Yoruba priestess, worked with local artists to restore and fill the Osun sacred grove with monumental sculptures and shrines. Largely through her efforts the grove was made a national monument in 1965. In 2005 the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
A different road to modern art
The Oshogbo artists are often contrasted with the university-trained Zaria Art Society. Both were searching for a modern Nigerian art; Zaria argued its way there through theory and the academy, Oshogbo through workshops and performance. Their mix of music, theatre and painting belongs to the same Nigerian creative world that produced Afrobeat. For another self-taught urban movement, see Congolese popular painting.