all images by George Odoh, reproduced with permission
The uli revivalist initiative, pioneered by Uche Okeke in Nsukka in 1970, flourished for about four decades. This idea reached its peak in 1997 when it was celebrated internationally in an exhibition, The Poetics of Line curated by Simon Ottenberg, at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Ottenberg also wrote an authoritative book about the origin and praxis of the uli artistic initiative, New Traditions from Nigeria: Seven Artists of the Nsukka Group.1 Beyond this exhibition and publication and others that precede and postdate them, the spirit of uli has not died completely. Like the phoenix, it has recrudescent powers. These qualities are found in the works of a new generation of Nsukka artists, especially in a body of illustrations of the themes of the novel Things Fall Apart2 (Achebe 1958) by...