| Moyo Okediji Moyo Okediji is a good friend of mine, he is a professor of visual arts at the University of Colorado at Denver and assistant curator of African, African American, and Oceanic arts at the Denver Art Museum as well as an accomplished artist and author. |
| Polly Nordstrand (left) who is the assistant curator of American Indian Arts at the Denver Art Museum, and Moyo Okediji at a Denver Art Museum / Douglas Society event in September 2005 |
| Some of his work and information |
| The Dutchman, 1995 acrylic on canvas 48 x 72 inches by MOYO OKEDIJI Nigerian, born 1956 The Dutchman was painted after Okediji spent time in the United States and gained greater insight into the daily realities of African Americans. He encountered firsthand how artists confronted that reality in their work. It was inspired, in part, by African American poet Robert Hayden's poem about the Atlantic slave trade titled, Middle Passage: Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy: Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; horror the corposant and compass rose. Middle Passage: voyage thorough death to life on these shores. This painting perhaps best embodies the theme of this exhibition. It may also signify Okediji's own psychic reconnection to his long lost ancestors strewn across the Atlantic and to those who survived in the New World. Prominent tints of blue, competing with orange complements, have dual signification — the deep waters of the Atlantic and the pain at the root of African American blues music. Here is the Middle Passage experienced through Yoruba eyes, now opened to the deeper aspects of that passage. This piece was in an exhibit called: Transatlantic Dialogue: Contemporary Art In and Out of Africa |
| "Fela in Mamiwataland," a 2002 painting by Moyo Okediji, is among the artworks on display at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photo by David Paul Morris for the Chronicle. |
| The Shattered Gourd Yoruba Forms in Twentieth-Century American Art Moyo Okediji Release Date: 5/1/03 ISBN: 0295981504 256 Pages About the Book The Shattered Gourd uses the lens of visual art to examine connections between the United States and the Yoruba region of western Nigeria. In Yoruba legend, the sacred Calabash of Being contained the Water of Life; when the gourd was shattered, its fragments were scattered over the ground, death invaded the world, and imperfection crept into human affairs. In more modern times, the shattered gourd has symbolized the warfare and enslavement that culminated in the black diasporas. The "re-membering" of the gourd is represented by the survival of people of African origin all over the Americas, and, in this volume, by their rediscovery of African art forms on the diaspora soil of the United States. Twentieth-century African American artists employing Yoruba images in their work have gone from protest art to the exploration and celebration of the self and the community. But because the social, economic, and political context of African art forms differs markedly from that of American culture, critical contradictions between form and meaning often appear in African American works that use African forms. In this book-the first to treat Yoruba forms while transcending the conventional emphasis on them as folk art, focusing instead on the high art tradition-Moyo Okediji uses nearly four dozen works to illustrate a broad thematic treatment combined with a detailed approach to individual African and African American artists. Incorporating works by such artists as Meta Warrick Fuller, Hale Woodruff, Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, Ademola Olugebefola, Paul Keene, Jeff Donaldson, Howardena Pindell, Muneer Bahauddeen, Michelle Turner, Michael Harris, Winnie Owens-Hart, and John Biggers, the author invites the reader to envision what he describes as "the immense possibilities of the future, as the twenty-first century embraces the twentieth in a primal dance of the diasporas," a future that heralds the advent of the global as a distinct movement in art, beyond postmodernism. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About the Author(s) Moyo Okediji is professor of visual arts at the University of Colorado at Denver and curator of African, African American, and Oceanic arts at the Denver Art Museum. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reviews "...Thought-provoking and unique in its exploration of the cultural extensions of the African diaspora and the artistic opportunities afforded by the resulting fusion of traditions. This book is also a serious contribution to African American social, political, and cultural history. -- Library Journal |
| African Renaissance Old Forms, New Images in Yoruba Art by Moyo Okediji ISBN: 0-87081-688-8 Binding: Hardcover Paper Pages: 200 Illustrations: 20 color, 42 b&w Published: 2002 African Renaissance: Old Forms, New Images in Yoruba Art describes, analyzes, and interprets the historical and cultural contexts of an African art renaissance using the twentieth- and twenty-first-century transformation of ancient Yoruba artistic heritage. Juxtaposing ancient and contemporary Yoruba art, Okediji defines this art history through the lens of colonialism, an experience that served to both destroy ancient art traditions and revive Yoruba art in the twentieth century. With vivid reproductions of paintings, prints, and drawings, Okediji describes how Yoruba art has replenished and redefined itself. Okediji groups the text into several broadly overlapping periods that intricately detail the journey of Yoruba art and artists: first through oppression by European colonialism, then the attainment of Nigeria’s independence and the new nation’s subsequent military coup, and ending with present-day native Yoruban artists fleeing their homeland. Based upon extensive interviews with the artists and critical readings of the existing literature on contemporary Yoruba art, African Renaissance: Old Forms, New Images in Yoruba Art will appeal to the art historian and art collector and serve as a wonderful introduction to the canon of Yoruba art for the general reader. Moyo Okediji is the curator for African and Oceanic arts at the Denver Art Museum and an assistant professor of African and African American art history at the University of Colorado, Denver. |
| Below are pieces from his series called "Yoruba Genesis" - 1989 |
| Rand African Art home page |