On Monday morning, in the middle of packing up her life for Cape Town, South Africa, curator Lauren Tate Baeza took one more walk through the High Museum of Art’s new Nigeria galleries. She did it by phone, hours before her flight.
“We don’t just have them,” Baeza said of the works on view. “We got to go find it.”
The galleries opened to the public Oct. 16. They follow last year’s gallery of women’s ceramic traditions, completing Baeza’s two-part reinstallation of the museum’s African art galleries. They also read as a parting argument from the High’s former Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art about how Atlanta might see a country — and continent.
So, how do you tell a story of African art in a few rooms?
You narrow it.
Baeza let the museum’s existing holdings guide her. The High’s African holdings were strongest in Nigerian and Congolese work, and Atlanta’s ties to Nigeria, including the sister-city relationship with Lagos, helped tip the focus toward Nigeria, she said.
Her colleague Mekala Krishnan, the High’s Shannon Landing Amos associate director of museum interpretation, hopes visitors find that focus “so much more eye-opening and rewarding than trying to engage with sweeping generalizations about art from an entire continent.”
Next, Baeza decided to organize the space around art schools that carried Nigeria from colonial rule into independence. The colonial-era Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology had three campuses: Zaria, Ibadan and Enugu. The Zaria campus, now Ahmadu Bello University, produced the Zaria Rebels, including founding member Bruce Onobrakpeya. The Enugu campus was absorbed into the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where the Ghanaian-born sculptor El Anatsui taught. Anatsui, whom the High calls one of Africa’s most compelling contemporary artists, turns aluminum bottle caps into shimmering metal “cloth.” His work anchors the Nsukka story here. The Ibadan campus temporarily housed the school that became Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, the school connected to sculptor Lamidi Fakeye, whose work greets visitors at the entrance. A fourth movement had no campus at all: self-taught artists, among them Twins Seven-Seven, who gathered in workshops in Oshogbo in the 1960s and ’70s.
The galleries follow the colonial, postcolonial and contemporary artists of these schools as the schools change and as the nation does. Each school has its own symbol, and visitors can find those symbols on object labels throughout the museum.
In 2021, with Baeza’s encouragement, the museum established a fund to acquire work by Nigerian master artists. The goal, she said, was to tell “this more robust and complete” story of art-making in Nigeria by adding 20th-century fine art to the collection’s cultural and decorative objects from the same century.
What will visitors experience?
Five musicians greet visitors at the entrance. Carved in wood by Fakeye, whom Baeza calls arguably the most important Nigerian sculptor of the 20th century, the figures each wear a different Yoruba traditional cloth, its patterns cut into the wood. “It’s really detailed and beautiful,” Baeza said. The figures face different directions so visitors circle them and see every side. The work is on long-term loan, and she hopes it becomes a gift to the museum.
Inside, carved masks and other ceremonial objects share space with paintings, prints and sculpture by modern Nigerian artists. Most of what’s on view is new to the collection, but a number of works came out of storage, where some sat for years. Among those holdings were what she called “really beautiful” beadworks that needed conservation. She chose new acquisitions to respond to works like these.
The pairings are the point. Much of what Western museums present as traditional African art dates to the 20th century, Baeza explained, the same century as the modern work around it. She wants visitors to see those objects as modern, too, and as the work of individual makers.
“I want people to go in there and see the design and the agency of individual artists,” she said. Later she added, “These are living traditions. Benin bronzes are still being made. This tradition has never gone anywhere.”
She also meant the galleries as an answer to the restitution debate that was popular when she arrived at the High. That conversation, she said, “centers colonialism a little too much for my liking.”
The installation will keep changing. Many more works from these schools are waiting in storage, and Baeza encourages visitors to come back to see the rotations.
What does it take to find a masterpiece?
It took five years of planes, private collector conversations, provenance research, and restoration projects to reach Oct. 16.
“I can’t just call a gallery and buy it,” Baeza said. “I don’t think that people think of curators as out in the world digging around, taking malaria medication, trying to find the masterpieces of a time.”
Centennial purchases credited to the High’s Nigerian Modernism Initiative show the reach of that search: Ben Enwonwu’s 1977 painting “Agbogho Mmuo,” Jimo Akolo’s 1962 “Four Women and a Chicken” and an untitled 1984 work by Oshogbo artist Rufus Ogundele, waiting for wall space.
Then came the hard part: choosing what to say and display.
“I feel like every installation or exhibition is another master’s degree at least,” Baeza said. She worked with Krishnan to cut the research to its “most potent simplicity.” Baeza calls Krishnan “my greatest collaborator on this institutionally.”
Krishnan hopes visitors “feel that sense of dialogue and possibility, and see how these schools became epicenters of expression.” She added, “I hope the Nigerian community in Atlanta feels a sense of pride and ownership when they’re in the galleries.”
What does Baeza leave behind?
In the ceramics gallery, Ngozi-Omeje Ezema’s 2022 “Togetherness” forms a vessel from suspended ceramic pieces. Ezema studied at Nsukka under Anatsui’s mentorship, Baeza said, and sight lines put his work behind hers. “When we installed that, I knew that that was what was going to happen,” she said. It’s one of the throughlines she built across the galleries: “teacher, student, teacher, student.”
That throughline is meant to raise questions, not settle them. “I hope that people open up their phones and start Googling,” Baeza said.
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State Rep. Phil Olaleye, a Nigerian American who represents Georgia House District 59, sponsored a 2023 resolution recognizing Baeza, whose leadership he credits with bringing greater recognition to Onobrakpeya during the artist’s U.S. museum debut. That experience, he said, “was about visibility, cultural preservation and giving Nigerian artistic excellence the recognition it deserves on an international stage.”
“As Lauren moves on from the museum, there could be no more fitting send-off than the lasting legacy of this exhibition and the visibility she helped bring to Nigerian art,” Olaleye said.
