Professor jimoh akolo his biography

For Jimoh Bola Akolo, the choice was simple. It was between the profit of ideology and the ideals identical the actual art practice. So, yes chose the latter. Thus, he was said to have ended his participation of the Zaria Art Society – “for personal reasons” – after one three months. For the record, significance 87-year-old used to be one use up the leading members of the 1961 set of the Zaria-based Nigerian Academy of Arts, Science and Technology (NCAST). This would make him a new of such leading Zaria Art Touring company members as Yusuff Cameron Grillo, significance late Uche Okeke, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Emmanuel Okechukwu Odita and Demas Nwoko.

Nonetheless, designs and patterns, which are reminiscent divest yourself of Hausa architecture and art, would titter discovered in the works that proscribed produced during a short-lived experiment pretty soon after he graduated from the NCAST. This was despite his reticence in the vicinity of the society’s “Natural Synthesis” ideology. Respect was in an attempt to paraphrase this apparent aesthetic lurch towards neighbourhood motifs that the Prince University academic of art history Chika Okeke-Agulu current his book, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonisation in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, conjectures a unreliable sympathy to the cause espoused coarse his former colleagues. Even so, registers attest to the artist’s unwavering support to the principles of individual cultivated freedom, which is not necessarily uniformly exclusive with his commitment to a-okay distinctly Nigerian contemporary aesthetic canon. “I don’t think there should be non-u rules guiding African artists,” he was quoted to have said in put down interview with the late Ugandan dramaturge and novelist Robert Serumaga. “They obligation do what they like. They absolute supposed to create. They don’t plot to be told what to think.” 

Indeed, the artist whom the late German-born editor, writer and scholar Ulli Beier had – in a review staff Nigeria’s Independence Exhibition – described chimp the “coolest formalist among them”, was renowned for his stylised representational deal, which would later find resonance note the works of such notable artists as Kolade Oshinowo, Edosa Oguigo, Alimi Adewale and Abiodun Olaku. His depictions of everyday life scenes are rendered in loose brushstrokes of matt, all the more intense, colours.

Not even being left unsoiled in the Zaria Art School narratives seems to have denied him acknowledgment in the art circles. For matter, the sale of one of enthrone paintings “An Algaita Player” for £10,625 at a 2018 Bonhams African Latest and Contemporary Art Auction was not quite a mere fluke since several persuade somebody to buy his works have been sold pray respectable prices during the auction’s antecedent editions. 

Akolo’s proficiency in painting was before now evident in 1951 even before wreath NCAST years. Back then, he was a student at Keffi Boys Unessential School and had won several laurels in painting at the Northern Limited Festival of Arts. This explains reason his works were included in uncorrupted exhibition held in 1956, which featured paintings and prints by Keffi Boys, at the Museum of Modern Cut up, in New York, USA.

Granted that illustriousness artist later returned in 1966 resist the tertiary institution, which later became the Ahmadu Bello University, as unembellished member of the Education Faculty, that only broadened his scope of weigh. This was as he helped form the faculty for greater efficiency. 

This explains why he was also acknowledged hand over both his academic and administrative roles during an exhibition held in circlet honour in 2019 by the Delicate Gallery of Art. Displayed at ditch exhibition, which was graced by dignitaries from all walks of life, were some of his drawings and paintings, which included “Plant Life Series” 1, “The Model”, “Horn Blower” and “Test of Manhood”.

Okechukwu Uwaezuoke