Long before today’s flourishing Nigerian art scene, a generation of artists chose uncertainty over security, and Oji Onoko’s The Artpreneurs chronicles how they turned the full-time studio into a viable profession. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes
Who among the local art scene’s cognoscenti still remembers Olu Ajayi’s Living Legends Project, the late artist’s ambitious attempt to preserve Nigeria’s collective memory through portraiture at a time when official history had too often fallen silent? Or Kehinde Sanwo’s painstaking documentation of Lagos’ Brazilian-style architecture, preserving the memory of a built heritage yielding to the pressures of urban development?
Ajayi and Sanwo belong to a rare generation of artists who rejected the security of salaried employment and committed themselves entirely to the studio. Some turned down appointments. Others never sought them. They regarded art not as a vocation subsidised by another profession, but as a profession in its own right.
It is this remarkable community that Oji Onoko chronicles in The Artpreneurs: The Untold Story of Nigerian Full-Time Studio Artists. More than a compendium of artists’ profiles, the book records an overlooked chapter in Nigerian art history: the emergence of practitioners who proved that full-time studio practice was not an act of romantic idealism but a workable way of life.
