Optimism in the Time of COVID-19

Michael Jimoh

Nigerian artist Bob-Nosa Uwagboe was in a peculiar situation far away in Gdansk, Poland, sometime in March 2020. His exhibition Transit was to run for at least a month, simultaneously with an art residency that would take even longer. Malgorzata Paszylka-Glaza, curator of the Department of Modern Art at the National Museum in the port city, had made adequate preparations. She had curated works at the same venue by artists from Dubai, France, Germany and Iran. Uwagboe would be the first Nigerian, possibly African. She was ecstatic, and so was the Polish audience in anticipation of paintings described as full of “power, of colour and truth about the world”.

Ironically, the world itself denied Uwagboe the much-anticipated exhibition by way of Covid-19, at the same time seeing the residency slipping through his fingers. He was “disillusioned”, probably wondering “why me”, as Job may have done privately. Trapped in a foreign country, the artist was pretty much in stasis, like the rest of humanity at the time.

Also caught up in a somewhat similar situation, 6,600 kilometres away in New York, was another Nigerian artist, Tony Nsofor. It was April 2020, his fourth visit to a city he not only hoped to soak up the bubbly ambience of, but also to avail himself of the opportunities open to artists. Instead of the welcoming arms of museum and gallery administrators, he met numbingly cold, empty streets in the Big Apple. It was weird and unfamiliar.

Several more Nigerian artists were equally experiencing the weird and unfamiliar in their respective locations, sequestered against their wishes in Antwerp, Cologne, Frankfurt, Freiburg, Kaiserslautern and Nuremberg. Prior to that time, things were going swimmingly in the art world; “the familiar rhythms of the art scene seemed assured”.

A biennial was slated for that year. The Dakar Art Biennale, better known as Dak’Art, was just around the corner.Add a slew of auctions and exhibitions into the mix and you had a line of curators, collectors and connoisseurs at the ready. But everything stopped just as abruptly as plans had been made so elaborately. Nobody expected the interruption. Worse still, nobody expected it to last as long as it did. And while it lasted, life — art, in this case — must go on. The place of art in those times of uncertainty is the subject of this book. “What becomes of art,” the author pointedly queries, “when the world itself goes into a lockdown?”

Shades of Hope: Covid-19 Reminiscences through Art by Okechukwu Uwaezuoke gives readers a glimpse into the private preoccupations vis-à-vis the professional engagements of nearly a dozen artists interviewed during the pandemic. Diasporic Nigerian artists such as Emmanuel Eni, Chidi Kwubiri, Jimmy Nwanne, Nsofor, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Godfrey Williams-Okorodus, Emeka Udemba and Uwagboe spoke as candidly as possible to the author, as did their home-based counterparts, including Blessing Azubike, Blaise Gundu Gbaden and Sam Ovraiti.

As a remembrance of things past, a past that seems so distant now but which held the entire world hostage back then, the artists responded to the pandemic in different ways. Some took it in their stride, waiting for it to blow over. One or two became quite philosophical. At least one tried to adjust to the “new normal”. Some others experimented with new styles of painting. The lockdown also disrupted carefully laid-out plans for others.

Williams-Okorodus regretfully cancelled a trip to Nigeria from his base in Antwerp. Pastime? Yo-yoing from beading bracelets and necklaces to tending his garden, possibly with stolen kisses and butt-pinching in between, in the apartment he shared with his wife. Jimmy Nwanne had no such romantic diversion. On a two-week vacation from Freiburg in Germany, the lockdown literally marooned the artist in Nigeria, leaving him estranged from his family in Europe.

What the lockdown did was drive most of them back to their studios, mulling ideas and concepts, sketchpad handy, brushes and palette as well, applying hues, dabbing, tracing, splashing paint on canvas after canvas, possibly chain-smoking like Picasso in the process. Despite the gloomy outlook, there was no time to navel-gaze about a virus that was just a sneezing distance away. Instead, they dug deeper in their studios as if in hibernation. By the time they emerged, there were dozens of new paintings and artworks bearing their signatures.

In Nigeria, for instance, Blessing Azubike, initiator and coordinator of the collective Artists Ladder, went to work. She pooled together a number of her collaborators and then challenged them to “dig deep into their hearts and intellect to come up with powerful messages”. Covering the first 14-day period from March 30, 2020, when the late President Muhammadu Buhari announced a lockdown in Abuja, Lagos and Ogun states, the paintings were to reflect the mood of the time. Participants included Omovo Odupitan Ayoola, Sunny Efemena, Halima Abubakar-Idrissu, Fatai Kelani and Azeez Salami. Their brief mirrored Rauschenberg’s admonition: “The artist’s job is to be witness to his time in history.”

In Lafia, capital of Nasarawa State, university teacher Gbaden did just that. With thoughts of the pandemic weighing on his mind, Gbaden had “to do art that would reflect its damaging effects on the human psyche”.

Central to Shades of Hope is how Covid-19 obstructed creativity, as seen from the artists’ perspective. True, it denied them public spaces to exhibit their works after weeks, even months, spent in monkish seclusion, and so affected their earning power. But being the restless spirits some of them are, they found a way around the obstacles imposed by the pandemic, thus reaffirming the resilience and resourcefulness of the artists themselves.

Previously published in the Arts and Review pages of THISDAY newspaper under Uwaezuoke’s editorship, the pieces have now been republished as a book by Nostalgiamedia Books in Canada.

With Shades of Hope, Uwaezuoke has more than confirmed his place as an authority on the arts in Nigeria. The Foreword, written by Jesse Castellote of the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, is also an endorsement of Uwaezuoke’s commitment not only to the arts but also to writing.

The idea for Shades of Hope, Uwaezuoke said recently, came to him in a flash of inspiration, not unlike artists receiving random visitations from the muse.

The muse has never departed, it seems, from the most consistent editor of the Arts and Review pages of THISDAY since their inception. Readers recall stories bylined by Jahmin Ovhworiole, who was pioneer editor, Kazeem Adeleke, Oji Onoko, the late Maurice Archibong, Tunde Okoli and Ijeoma Oguachuba — herself an artist. But Uwaezuoke has stayed longer than any of them, making the pages among the most avidly read by the arts community in Nigeria every week. He maintains a one-on-one relationship with contemporary Nigerian artists, home and away, based on reciprocal respect. That much is evident in Shades of Hope, where readers hear the subjects themselves without unnecessary interjections from the author.

Almost in defiance, and as if speaking for his colleagues concerning the pandemic and art generally, one of them volunteered to Uwaezuoke: “Nothing can stop art, artists and the art-loving public… not even a stupid, devilish virus. Medical or social conditions cannot lock down creative ambitions.”

It was the voice of Kwubiri, who, regrettably, died on 26 December 2025. Nothing could be more apt as a comment on the enduring life of art — Covid-19 or not.

• Jimoh writes from Lagos