IN Nengi Mrpainting of gathera wounded figure lies on a stretcher, the body dripping on what looks like pieces of rubble surrounded by a mass of figures with amorphous faces. A small hand rises as if to bless the wounded figure as she is carried to safety. In the image, the crowd gradually dries up as far from the stage as possible.
The work was inspired by the collapse of a building near the artist’s studio in the Onikan neighborhood of Lagos Island. “This is a picture of humanity and where we need to be as individuals,” the artist told the Observer. “It was just people coming together, pulling people out of the rubble. There was no one from the government to help. So this piece for me is about compassion and sharing the grief.”
This June, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, at a solo exhibition with the same titlethe Nigerian painter and sculptor will display works made between 2020 and 2026. It is her first institutional show in the US and the exhibition will explore protest and political uncertainty alongside collective solidarity and beauty with paintings that meditate on collective care and dream of new worlds.
Omuku is not new to exploring collectivism and belonging. After graduating from the Slade School of Fine Arts, driven by feelings of isolation and otherness, she returned to Nigeria and found a footing in textiles. “Wherever I turned, if I saw someone in traditional clothing, I could immediately say, this person is from here, they meet them,” she said. “It made so much sense to me that I could look at someone and identify a small part of who they were through their clothing.”
This community euphoria inspired her investigation into textiles throughout Nigeria, where she settled on Sanyan, a pre-colonial hand-spun textile made from cotton mixed with wild silk fibers. Sanyan is worn by the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, and their textiles were well altered in paint and brush, and she soon turned this communal cultural garment into canvas.
In this show, Omuku evokes history again through archival images of Nigerian protests as a reference for her paintings, in the process creating a reconstruction, remodeling and remembrance of history. “I was aware that I was painting on a heritage textile that has real historical significance,” she said of the collision of fabric and archives. “I’m thinking about the height of weaving in Nigeria that was done in this golden age of creation. I’m also looking for instances where the fabric of society was torn apart in protest.”
Her paintings will be presented alongside the museum’s African art collection in a conversation that reveals cultural and material continuities across generations. For so long, African collections have been relegated to anthropological events and ethnographic studies, but Omuku believes the upcoming show will expand that context, providing a space that elaborates on the histories and traditions of art making over time, as well as opening a new discourse about art from the continent.
Beauty forms a seismic piece of the puzzle in The Gathering. This largely comes from Omuku’s horticultural background, training with her mother, a florist and landscaper. Floral arrangements have been integral to the way she thinks about composition, color and content, although this has remained a quiet part of her process and practice. “All gardening is landscape painting. The concept of changing nature to suit a particular picturesque is essentially what we do as landscape painters. It’s the same principles.”
It was an agonizing depression brought on by the regurgitating paintings of difficulties that led her to ask newer questions about her practice, inviting the beauty of flowers and nature to the fore. “I thought, shouldn’t art have space to dream of other worlds? Of new things? Of new futures? In that element of dreaming, the landscape eventually settled. I opened up to a Nigerian romanticism, a gift to the bodies in my paintings. Nothing speaks of liberation like nature.”
The result of that liberation is a work embedded in material history and memory that is tangible yet sensuous in its sensibility. The artist does not see beauty in times of crisis as a tension, but rather as a necessary intervention, something she aptly displayed in a painting of jerry cans during a protest about the lack of gasoline. The bodies are immersed in the beauty of the landscape; chaos and hardship are acknowledged, but there is also an acknowledgment to dream up the younger imaginations.
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