Tiwa Savage Partners Berklee College of Music for African Creatives

Yinka Olatunbosun

At an exclusive evening gathering held recently at The Delborough, Lagos, Afrobeats icon Tiwa Savage unveiled the Tiwa Savage Music Foundation, announcing a landmark partnership with her alma mater, the Berklee College of Music.

The collaboration—titled “Berklee in Nigeria: Tiwa Savage Intensive Music Program”—will mark the first time the prestigious Boston-based institution brings its official Berklee on the Road initiative to West Africa.

Designed to bridge what Savage describes as the “access gap” for African creatives, the programme will deliver world-class music education directly in Lagos.

Scheduled to run from April 23 to 26, the four-day intensive programme will host 100 emerging music creators. While the programme itself is fully funded, participants will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation.

The curriculum spans a wide spectrum of the music industry, including performance and songwriting, music production and sound engineering, music business, publishing and entertainment law, as well as music therapy and film scoring.

The programme will culminate in a live showcase and closing ceremony, where outstanding participants may receive scholarship awards for further study at Berklee’s Boston campus or through Berklee Online.

Reflecting on the motivation behind the initiative, Savage noted that although African music now commands global attention, the industry still requires stronger infrastructure. The programme, she explained, seeks to nurture the “architects” of the industry—not only performers but also the producers, lawyers, and engineers who sustain creative ecosystems and safeguard artistic ownership.

She also underscored the importance of education in an era shaped increasingly by artificial intelligence, stressing that African creatives must become “educated leaders” in the space rather than passive observers.

Applications are currently open to emerging musicians, producers, and songwriters aged 18 and above who have at least one year of experience with their instrument or voice. With the application deadline set for March 20, prospective participants are required to complete an online form and submit a two- to three-minute video showcasing their abilities.

Selected participants will take part in a series of lectures, workshops, and ensemble sessions led by Berklee’s globally acclaimed faculty—world-renowned artists and educators—within a supportive, non-critical learning environment designed to elevate their professional musicianship. 

Oliver Enwonwu’s U.S. Lecture Tour Reopens Debate on African Modernism

Yinka Olatunbosun

Curator and cultural strategist Oliver Enwonwu has inaugurated a new international lecture series with a two-city tour across the United States, carrying his longstanding scholarship on modern African art and postcolonial artistic identity to Stanford University and Florida International University.

The initiative opens what is intended to be an ongoing programme of research-driven public lectures and institutional collaborations—one that approaches modern art in Africa not as a marginal footnote to 20th century  art history, but as a decisive intellectual and philosophical current within global modernity.

The tour began at Stanford University through a set of engagements jointly organised by the Department of Art & Art History and the Department of African and African American Studies. Enwonwu first addressed students in the morning session of Modern Africa: Art & Decolonization, a course taught by Dr Joshua I. Cohen, Associate Professor of Art History. Later that evening, he delivered the public lecture, Art as Resistance: Ben Enwonwu’s Vision for the Postcolonial African Artist, held at the DAAAS Event Stadium in Building 80 of the Main Quad.

Measured yet quietly provocative, the lecture revisited Ben Enwonwu’s place as a foundational figure in the emergence of modern art in Africa. Enwonwu explored how his father’s practice negotiated the fraught cultural terrain of the colonial and early post-independence periods, while advancing a vision of the African artist as both cultural worker and intellectual agent. In doing so, the lecture questioned the durability of inherited Western art-historical frameworks that have often struggled to accommodate African modernist thought on its own philosophical terms.

A public conversation followed, with Dr Cohen serving as interlocutor. For Kennii Ekundayo, a doctoral student in Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History, the encounter carried particular resonance. Ekundayo—who is also the teaching assistant for the Modern Africa course and facilitator of the event—reflected on the significance of the visit:

“Oliver’s presence and his lectures here at Stanford were necessary because his work sits precisely at the intersection of many of the questions I care about as both a scholar and curator. Beyond his own artistic practice, he has been deeply committed to sustaining and clarifying the legacy of Ben Enwonwu — a figure who remains foundational to any serious conversation about modernism in Africa. By tracing both his and his father’s artistic footprints back to his grandfather, he also brings renewed visibility to histories whose documentation was eroded by the wiles of colonial invasion. That kind of intergenerational stewardship feels especially urgent now, as contemporary African art enjoys unprecedented global visibility while the historical scaffolding that made this moment possible is often underacknowledged.”

The series continued on February 26 in Florida, where curator Ludlow E. Bailey, CADA International LLC, together with the Public Humanities Lab at Florida International University, hosted An Evening with Oliver Enwonwu. There, Enwonwu presented Decolonising Modernism: Ben Enwonwu, Spirituality, and the Politics of Representation—a lecture that offered a more intimate and reflective reading of his father’s artistic philosophy.

Drawing on archival images and carefully chosen works, Enwonwu traced the conceptual undercurrents of Ben Enwonwu’s practice, illuminating how spirituality, embodiment, and African epistemologies informed his understanding of modernism. Rather than situating him merely as a participant within 20th-century modernist discourse, the lecture proposed Ben Enwonwu as an architect of an African modernity shaped by Igbo cosmology, spiritual consciousness, and the intellectual imperatives of the postcolonial moment.

Following the presentation, Enwonwu entered into a public dialogue with Bailey, reflecting on the cultural and philosophical foundations of modern art in Nigeria and on Ben Enwonwu’s enduring influence on postcolonial artistic identity. As Bailey observed, Enwonwu’s interpretation provided a thoughtful counterpoint to prevailing institutional narratives surrounding the current exhibition on Nigerian modernism at the Tate in London. While acknowledging the exhibition’s significance, he emphasised that Ben Enwonwu’s work must be read within a wider African intellectual and spiritual framework—one that challenges Eurocentric art-historical models and repositions modernism as a truly global, multi-centred phenomenon.

Together, the Stanford and Miami lectures form the opening movement of a developing body of public scholarship dedicated to deepening the understanding of modern art in Africa through archival research, lived experience, and critical dialogue. By interweaving curatorial insight, historical inquiry, and institutional engagement, the series opens new avenues for thinking about cultural memory, postcolonial artistic identity, and the layered histories that continue to shape African modernism today.