All rephotography by Adeyemi Akande, Black & Loud Photography, Yaba, Lagos; and Christian Scully, Design Imaging Studios, Providence, Rhode Island
The “Zaria Art Society” carries a lot of weight in Africanist art history circles. It was the name of a club founded by students at the first Western-style formal art program in Nigeria, the fine arts department at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology (NCAST) at Zaria (now Ahmadu Bello University). Led by painter Uche Okeke, the Society critiqued the colonial thrust of art education that taught Nigerian artists to draw snow and sculpt like Michelangelo (Okeke 1998a: 57–59). Instead, in the face of antipathy from some faculty and students, Society members articulated a new program for Nigerian art. They called their program “natural synthesis,” a framework for filtering appropriate elements of Nigerian cultural traditions into contemporary Nigerian cultural production and synthesizing “old and new” and...