Art Beyond the Elites

Jess Castellote

Since last week, something good has happened at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art at Pan-Atlantic University. Thanks to a generous supporter, we now offer free entry to our galleries. We are proud of this move to bring more people closer to the arts. But even as we celebrate it, one question keeps bothering me: will free admission alone be enough? Many museums around the world, especially smaller ones, have been free for years. Yet their great collections still do not get as many visitors as they deserve.

Admission fees may discourage some visitors, but I suspect they are no longer the main obstacle. Most people simply assume that museums and galleries have little to do with them. If art is perceived as something distant from everyday concerns, opening the doors wider may not make much difference. It may be like building roads to places nobody wants to go.

When people talk about making art available to everyone, they usually mean two things: lower the price, or put art in public places like streets and roundabouts. These are helpful steps, but they rest on a diagnosis that mistakes the symptom for the disease. For most people, the biggest obstacle is not money. It is the sense that art does not connect with their world, that it speaks a language they were never taught, about things that do not touch their daily struggles and joys. This is quite noticeable in Lagos. Our city is full of creativity. Music is everywhere, in buses, homes, parties. Fashion lets people show who they are and what they dream of. Nollywood tells our stories to millions. Markets, churches, festivals, and streets are filled with colour, pattern, dance, and beauty. Nigerians are not strangers to art; we live with it every day. And yet, despite this cultural energy, museums and galleries often feel like peripheral places most people visit rarely or never.

I believe the heart of the problem is not exclusion but a perception of irrelevance. People are not actively rejecting fine art. They simply do not see how it connects to raising children, finding work, dealing with money problems, building relationships, chasing better days. A painting might look impressive, but if it feels removed from everyday realities, it is easy to overlook.

Many Lagosians do not stay away because anyone has kept them out. Nor is it simply that they know nothing about art. Rather, visiting a museum has never become part of how they imagine spending their time. The possibility barely enters their minds. That is not a problem of access. It is a problem of meaning. Part of this comes from how fine art is presented. Museums often lead with history, movements, expert explanations, useful for deeper study, but many first-time visitors have a simpler question first: why should I care about this? Most works of art ultimately return to familiar human experiences: the people we care about, the losses we endure, the ambitions we pursue, the questions we ask about ourselves and our place in the world. The challenge is to make that connection felt before loading people with facts and dates. The art market frequently makes things worse. When the loudest conversation about art concerns auction records and the speculation habits of the ultra-wealthy, the signal sent to everyone else is unambiguous: this is not for you.

So why do so few people even consider coming? The market woman in Balogun, the bus driver on the Mainland Bridge, the trader’s daughter in Surulere, they are not staying away because they tried the museum and found it unrewarding. Almost none of them have ever pictured a visit as a real possibility for someone like them. For many people, the museum occupies the same category as a courthouse or a government office: a place that exists, certainly, but not somewhere one thinks of spending a free afternoon. Free entry removes one obstacle, but it does nothing to plant the idea of going in the first place.

Part of this is simply who the museum appears to be for. If the only people ever seen entering are collectors, foreign tourists, and uniformed schoolchildren on a mandated trip, that becomes the unspoken membership list. Institutions communicate through appearances as much as through words.

This is why outreach must happen away from the museum, not just inside better-designed galleries. If the institution waits for people to arrive, it will keep attracting only those who already expected to belong there. Perhaps, the museum has to go to the market, the church hall, the bus terminal, the radio call-in show, carrying two or three objects and a willingness to talk, not as a one-off publicity stunt, but as a sustained, repeated presence, until the museum stops sounding like a place reserved for somebody else and starts sounding like an institution that already knows the neighbourhood.

Few people are persuaded to visit a museum by an advertisement; many are persuaded by a neighbour, a fellow trader, a member of their church who went and can describe what it was actually like. Institutions cannot do this alone. Churches, mosques, market associations, and community unions already command the weekly attention that museums can only dream of. A pastor or imam mentioning the museum, a market association organising a group outing, does more to legitimise a visit than any amount of institutional messaging, because it removes the sense that going would be stepping outside one’s own world.

None of this is mainly a question of money. It is a question of attitude. Those of us working at museums have to stop waiting for audiences to find them and begin meeting people where they already are. Instead of waiting to be discovered, the museum must go and build a reputation in the places where reputations are actually built, over a kitchen table, after Friday prayers, on the bus, at the office. Not on a billboard. Things will not change by themselves in the long run, either. In most Nigerian schools, art is treated as a small, unimportant subject, not something serious. Many young people grow up without ever learning how to enjoy or understand visual art properly. The effort to bring art to everyone cannot stop at free tickets and outreach campaigns. It must also reach our schools, not just to train artists, but to help every child develop the habit of looking, thinking, and feeling through art.

I am not saying we should make art simpler or less serious. Perhaps we should trust people more. Show them art that speaks to the same questions and feelings they already carry. Present it as something alive and connected to real life, not a special world requiring secret knowledge. Art for all is mainly about overcoming this feeling of irrelevance, helping people see how art reflects their own experiences, hopes, and challenges. When that happens, museums stop being places people feel they should visit. They become places people want to visit.

That connection can be built, not just by opening doors, but by showing up, consistently, in the places where people already gather and already feel at home. Free entry is a good start, but outreach matters more, and in the long run, so does what happens in art classes at school. Real change needs institutions willing to leave their own walls behind, and all of us willing to question old ideas about who art is really for. Art beyond the elites is not something institutions can simply deliver from above. It emerges when people begin to see their own concerns, memories, aspirations, and experiences reflected in what hangs on museum walls.

• Castellote, PhD, writes from the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art. Pan-Atlantic University