The practice of visual art in most multi-cultural societies especially in Africa is often approached in multi-dimensional ways. Although art itself knows no boundary, the culture as well as the artist’s environment continue to play an influential role in kind or type of art that the artist creates. Take Nigeria for example, there are approximately (or over) five hundred ethnic groups which the Berlin conference carved under one geographical area. The living and co-existing together of the peoples within the boundary has over the years been sustained by the cultural understanding of the individual groups. These groups have as well as practice varying cultures which is exhibited in their different forms of art.
While at some instances, cultural events are used as avenues for preaching the peace and unity of the nation (Nigeria), it is difficult to say that these cultures have a harmonizing point where each social or ethnic group in Nigeria feels at peace. For example, when a Yoruba man sees a Nok terra-cotta peace, he immediately links it to the cultures people in the Northern part of Nigeria. He tends to have an alienated way of embracing it. On the other hand, an Ife naturalistic portrait makes him (the Yoruba) feels more homely. Also, if an Ibo man sees a painting of Fulani milk maids, he feels the same way, but embraces his Igbo-Ukwu pieces. All of them (Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa, and other smaller ethnic groups) do not express this out-rightly, rather, it more like a feeling unexpressed but deduced from the knowledge of the person on such artifact.
The network of museums in Nigeria managed by National Council for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) have tried to create cultural harmony among the different socio-cultural groups in Nigeria by providing opportunity for the display of various cultural product, yet the public have not really been educated to patronize them as desired. The visual art sector, on the other hand, artists have not been able to adequately creative a visual culture using a central cultural symbol which all Nigerian ethnic group will feel at home with. The unifying symbols which all ethnic or social groups look up to is the national flag and the court of arm. The Society of Nigerian Artists (SNA) which is the apex professional body covering all practicing artists in Nigeria decides to adopt the Benin mask stolen during the British punitive expedition, as its ideal logo. This could be seen a political statement against the unwholesome shipping of valuable cultural materials which took place in the pre/colonial periods by the Europeans.
Today, even in the study of Nigerian art, the curriculum treats modern Nigerian art in a lump-some manner with great biases to individual cultures like Yoruba, Ibo or Ibibio art/cultures. Yet the cultural background of artists from these ethnic groups continue to manifest in their individual art works. On the other hand, the Nok, Ife, or Benin art pieces are treated as mere art traditions which formed the rudimentary clue to the study of art history in Nigeria. So far, many artists have lost the desire to build a creative world that will inevitably unite the different cultural groups using symbols that all Nigerian groups will embrace as theirs. The few Nigerian artists that seem to be leading in the field of visual art practice and which could initiate a course in order to achieve this quest are obviously looking in other directions. At the moment, the visual art sector is still a platform for exhibiting cultural in diversity. This means that Nigerians in groups; not Nigeria as one.
*** Art in Disguise ***
