Victor Ekpuk
By Siba Kumar Das
Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk says, “I am my ancestors’ essence.” He displays this statement in his Washington, D.C., studio, referencing thereby a cultural inheritance that he’s sure is partly genetic. In African communities, the past is powerfully potent, your ancestors guiding your life and visiting you periodically, their presence embodied “by masked and costumed dancers in public performances that continue to this day.” 1. You see the transmuted influence of these magnificently sculptured masks in Ekpuk’s art, especially the portraiture on display at the current Aicon Gallery show.
An indigene of the Ibibio-speaking culture prevalent in Nigeria’s southeast, where Ekpuk was born and where the afore-mentioned performances are especially important, the artist also takes inspiration from Nsibidi, an ancient ideographic communication system that arose in that region and spread from it. Other Nigerian modernists have drawn upon Nsibidi symbols and characters in their integration of the traditions of classical African art with Western and global modernism. Ekpuk, however, has gone far beyond them in scale and continuous usage. He has been enormously creative in taking ideas from other cultures and his own imagination to derive from his Nsibidi wellspring a unique aesthetic vocabulary.
The earliest work in the Aicon show, May You Always Live in Interesting Times, 1994, 2. is a captivating multi-colored painting with a playful title that in fact is a subtle, ironic reference to Nigeria’s troubled politics of the time when the government in Abuja was a military dictatorship. The colorfulness of the quotidian life and structures crammed into the painting’s background contain, too, a political message: day-to-day life had somehow to go on, and did so. Atop the stylized human figure---the ordinary citizen---is a Nsibidi-based symbolic sun radiating hope in a grim national predicament.
Soon after 1994, Ekpuk embarked upon a new artistic phase. He de-emphasized color and concentrated more on line, pushing his drawing practice such that it became akin to a bodily drive emerging freely from his unconscious. Eventually, this fluency with line enabled Ekpuk to develop the wall-size, Nsibidi-based murals for which he became famous. As this trend emerged and developed, it also influenced his painting style, which grew more subtle in color use and denser with line. Consider God Mother, 1998, and Song of Mami Wata, 2004, both in the Aicon show.
The first has a dark brownish-grey background superimposed with a dense Nsibidi text containing characters and ideographs with edges heightened with white. A flattened, grey-white Iroko tree standing in front highlights a female deity holding a child, and adjacent to them are four fish and a fowl, life on earth. Above them is the Nsibidi symbol for life and longevity, set within a dark orb resembling the sun. The Saint Louis Art Museum displayed God Mother along with a related art work by Ekpuk, in an exhibition the catalog of which tells us that, in God Mother, “the artist celebrated mythologies linking motherhood and ancestral lineage.” 3.
Though six years separate the creation of God Mother from the making of Song of Mami Wata, 2004, they are connected artworks. Both were made on ready-made wood boards, which Ekpuk originally spotted and bought in Jos, a city in northern Nigeria, and which he later commissioned from a small business in Lagos. Intended by their inventors as writing surfaces for Koranic verses in Arabic, their purpose was both the teaching of the Koran and the promotion of literacy. Ekpuk saw in them a foundation for his own paintings, and he took up their use, producing for some years his beautiful Manuscript Series.
Among them is Song of Mami Wata (Mother Water), which celebrates the folk legends that have spread in Africa, especially alongside the Atlantic, centering on ideas of water spirits, sea goddesses, and even Hindu divinities. The painting is artfully composed, its Nsibidi text limited to the sub-panel devoted to the fluidly-drawn Mami Wata, with the remainder taken up by a deep blue strip of cowrie shells and subdued triangle colors, all alluding to the sea.
The seven sculptures in the Aicon show---four affixed to walls, three standing---are all structurally flat and may be seen as extensions of his drawing practice. Consider the aluminum standing piece The Wise One, 2024. It’s another artwork in a long series expressing Ekpuk’s idea of the human head as the center of human consciousness, which he astutely evokes through Nsibidi-based, drawing-inspired imagery. The sculpture’s ultramarine blue color is also telling, in line with the artist’s belief that that color expresses a primordial psychic energy.
Especially worth a deep look is a set of six vividly colored portraits, all painted in 2025. Images of three---Anwan Obong (Chief’s Wife), Eyen Ekoi (Ekoi Girl), and Ancestor Ballad ---accompany this review to support the following discussion that applies to all six. Ekpuk has been making portraits from the start of his career but these represent both a reimagining of what he has done so far and a new beginning. From a personal collection of masks, statues, and puppets created in his Ibibio culture, he has selected a variety of ideas and forms, and transmuted them to imagined contemporary figures, to whom he has imparted complexity and expressiveness. He uses brilliant colors to this end, returning thereby to the focus on color that dominated his early career. He enlarges and diversifies the tactility of his textures, especially by fixing dry acrylic to parts of his surfaces. Building upon previous collage-making, he also applies Dutch wax-print textiles and burlap in his new portraits such that, via intertextuality, he extends his art with a new profundity.
Ekpuk’s wax-print collages (within Ekoi Girl’s face, see his disclosure of their provenance) are especially significant. The product of a long history of interaction between three regions---northern Europe, Southeast Asia, and West Africa---they are today “an authentic African art form.” Indeed, they are “both authentically African and authentically global.” 4. Ekpuk evokes this rich history even as he, through his collages, alludes to the art historical revolution that Picasso and Braque inaugurated when they introduced collage into their Cubist paintings---a revolution that is still unfolding on a global scale.
There is also more to the African side of the story. Through his textile collages, Ekpuk also recalls an ancient Ibibio aesthetic tradition whereby funeral shrines and memorial houses dedicated to deceased chiefs and other dignitaries are decorated in their interiors by various textiles, including Dutch wax prints, while cloth appliqué and patchwork banners decorate the facades. If you see the shrines and memorial houses as works of art, which they are, then why not recognize their textile additions for what they are, namely, proto-collage, or better still, collage before collage?
Victor Ekpuk: Looking Back and Forward is not comprehensive enough to be a retrospective. But it spans most of Ekpuk’s artistic career, and it says enough to validate two things. First, with regard to both portraiture and collage, we see him pushing boundaries. Second, it tells us that the artist Victor Ekpuk is both authentically African and authentically global.
1. “Beauty and Ugliness in African Art and Thought”, Wilfried van Damme, in Petridis, Constantine (ed), The Language of Beauty in African Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Il., 2022, page 99.
2. In 1998, Ekpuk started a studio art practice alongside other activities, including those of an illustrator and cartoonist at an important Lagos newspaper.
3. Bridges, Nichole N. (ed.), Narrative Wisdom and African Arts, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and Hirmer Verlag GmbH, Munich, Germany, 2024, pages 174-5.
4. “Network of Threads: Africa, Textiles, and Routes of Exchange”, Victoria Rovine, in Hodgson, Dorothy L. and Byfield, Judith A. (eds.), Global Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century, University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2017, pages 170-174.
