When Abuja Feasted on Colours
From December 3 to 7, the dream of the inaugural Abuja Art Fair crystallised at the Art Pavilion of the International Conference Centre (ICC), transforming the Federal Capital Territory into an unexpectedly vivid stage for creativity, dialogue, and cultural exchange. For a city that has been quietly undergoing an image makeover — helped along by a steady procession of exhibitions, open studios, and artistic flirtations — the fair arrived like yet another jaunty feather in a hat that is fast evolving into something far more theatrical than even its most hopeful boosters had imagined.
Abuja — which, despite its earnest push for cultural relevance, still often finds itself cast as Lagos’s quieter understudy — seemed positively thrilled by the disruption. Visitors roamed through the partitioned exhibition halls humming with colour and conversation. Paintings announced themselves with the boldness of debutantes; sculptures appeared to bask in the steady gaze of admirers; installations, predictably, carried the knowing air of works that understand far more than they choose to reveal. What emerged was a landscape that felt both carefully curated and faintly conspiratorial.
At the centre of this subtle cultural shift stands Jeff Ajueshi, a curator whose career has long fused patience with a sort of quiet audacity. Nearly two decades ago — when Abuja’s art ecosystem could, with generosity, be called aspirational — he set about founding the Thought Pyramid Art Gallery, which later expanded into the Thought Pyramid Art Centre. These early spaces functioned as creative refuges at a time when artists in the capital frequently complained of being marooned far from Lagos’s bustling art economy. Over the years, his vision sprawled geographically — from Abuja to Ikoyi, Benin City, and Oghara — forming a lattice of creative hubs that gently but firmly suggested that art life need not remain the exclusive preserve of a single coastal city.
If the Abuja Art Fair felt like the natural next chapter, it was because its exhibitions sketched confident lines across Nigeria’s many ongoing cultural conversations: environmental anxieties rendered in pigment and fibre; meditations on civic responsibility tucked into mixed-media assemblages; and works by women artists that sliced cleanly through the visual noise with a kind of understated authority. The atmosphere suggested a city not merely hosting art but engaging in an active, occasionally cheeky negotiation with it.
None of this occurred in isolation. Behind the scenes, patrons like Osahon Okunbo provided the kind of steady support that often separates lofty aspiration from works that are actually installed, lit, insured, and seen. Through the Osahon Okunbo Foundation, his commitment to contemporary art — especially the nurturing of emerging voices — lent the fair both a practical backbone and an ideological boost. In a country where arts funding can resemble a mirage shimmering just beyond reach, interventions like his bring a rare and tangible clarity.
For Abuja, the arrival of the fair meant more than a week of visual indulgence. It marked a subtle but significant shift in Nigeria’s cultural map. Lagos may still reign as the country’s commercial art heavyweight — the enfant terrible with more stamina for traffic than most — but Abuja has begun staking a convincing claim as a hub of thoughtfulness, experimentation, and cross-regional artistic exchange. The fair broadened the national art calendar, offered a platform for Northern and Middle Belt artists too often overlooked in coastal curatorial circuits, and provided the city’s collectors with ideas and debates far fresher than their usual dinner-table fodder.
By the time the final day, December 7, drifted to a close, the transformation was unmistakable. Abuja had, if only briefly, set aside its reputation for bureaucratic composure and allowed itself to glow — not with political pomp, but with genuine artistic curiosity. The fair revealed that the city’s cultural pulse was no longer theoretical; it throbbed with visible confidence across the Art Pavilion’s galleries and walkways.
For many observers, the event felt both like a culmination and a beginning. Nearly two decades of groundwork by Ajueshi, alongside a network of artists, patrons, and cultural workers who saw potential where others saw a paper-pushing city, had finally borne fruit. Yet the fair also read like the opening chapter of a new story — a signal that Abuja’s role in Nigeria’s cultural narrative is expanding, perhaps inevitably. The event suggested that creativity and governance need not occupy separate spheres in the capital; they could coexist, overlap, and even intertwine, much to the delight of the city’s art aficionados.
In the end, Abuja Rising emerged not as a slogan but as a lived reality — a city discovering that its imagination, like its architecture, had room to stretch. And if the inaugural edition offered any indication, Abuja may soon be known not only as the nation’s political capital, but also as its quietly throbbing creative heart.
