The Art of Nigerian Women

Book excerpt: The Art of Nigerian Women by Chukwuemeka Bosah is a tightly packaged tome--an astonishingly delightful companion to a meme that was broached in the author's A Celebration of Modern Nigerian Art: 101 Nigerian Artists, published in 2010. In the current volume, Bosah marshals the intellectual capacity of some of the best scholars and curatorial impresarios in the field to contextualize the diversity of works of the artists featured. This work is a feat that must be acknowledged by students of Nigerian art for a number of reasons. First, this book contributes significantly to our knowledge of Nigerian art by its lasered focus on Nigerian women. Second, the author brings to the fore, in the process, a smorgasbord of creative enactments and analyses in an assortment of media by our womenfolk. Third, while Nigeria now boasts of a budding tribe of scholars on the visual arts, this is the first time, to my knowledge, that a book of this type has been published. And this brings us to the fourth reason: this book is the irrefutable demonstration of the maxim about lions having their own historians to obviate distortions that hunters would bring to the history of the hunt. This is a pioneering work, one that deserves a prominent place on the shelves of corporate, institutional, college, and personal libraries. Bosah deserves our admiration for the courage and resources ploughed into this work.