AT 92, ABAYOMI BARBER’S STILL THE MAN OF THE MOMENT

With an art practice spanning over seven decades, Abayomi Barber at 92 easily stands out as one of the contemporary Nigerian art scene’s leading lights. The artist, whose naturalistic paintings rebuff the Western notions of African art, was the toast of the Lagos art community at a recent event organised by the National Gallery of Art. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke reports

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When Oladimeji Abayomi Adebayo Alade Barber clocked 92, on October 23, last year, the rest of the country was gripped by fever spasms of mass protests against police brutality. During these protests, tagged EndSARS, cultural activities – like everything else – understandably ground to a halt nationwide. This was at a time when the COVID-19 protocols still discouraged large gatherings and the art public agonised over the effects of the earlier government-imposed lockdowns! Is it any wonder, therefore, that the National Gallery of Art – which is often known as the NGA – had to shelve its plans of organising an elaborate ceremony in honour of this artistic luminary?
Fast-forward to last Tuesday (May 18) afternoon. The gallery eventually had its way and hosted what was designed to be a formal reception at the decrepit National Commission for Museums and Monuments’ quadrangle and exhibition spaces.

Talking about the event, it arguably witnessed one of the largest turnouts to any art event in recent times. Besides featuring the Lagos art community’s crème de la crème, it was graced by the NGA’s director-general Ebeten W. Ivara as well as the representatives of the information, culture and tourism minister and kindred parastatals. Among those occupying the high table were the birthday celebrator Abayomi Barber, a former National Council of Arts and Culture secretary Frank Abiodun Aig-Imoukhuede, the octogenarian artist Bruce Onobrapkeya, the respected artist and art educator Kolade Oshinowo, the celebrated female artist Nike Davies-Okundaye, the art historian and visual artist Professor Peju Layiwola, the renowned art collector and the founder of the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Omooba Yemisi Shyllon, the artist and art administrator Oliver Enwonwu and the veteran journalist and art consultant Ben Tomoloju, who presented the special exhibition brochure. There was, of course, also the curator of the SMO Gallery, Sandra Obiago, whose presence was duly acknowledged by the event’s master of ceremony even though she was not seated at the high table.

As for the event, it owed its high-octane tenor more to Barber’s renown than to his bonhomie. Indeed, the nonagenarian’s admirable track record in the industry, whose narrative arc is as impressive as it is inspirational, easily distinguishes him from even among his contemporaries in the art scene. For besides tacitly establishing an art movement – known in the art historian circles as the Abayomi Barber Art School – he is admired for clawing his way from out of anonymity up the ladder-rungs of the industry’s recognition.

A botched plan to sail to England as a stowaway earned Barber the wrath of his maternal uncle Oba Adesoji Aderemi (the then the Ooni of Ife). For this audacious plot, he was to be confined at the monarch’s palace for another five years. But then, the inexorable decree of fate intervened about two and half months later and made his secret plans for an escape unnecessary. This was sometime in 1957 when his uncle Oba Aderemi was celebrating his ascension to the throne. The festivities naturally attracted distinguished Yoruba personalities, among whom was the revered politician and nationalist Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

A presentation of the portraits Barber did of Chief Awolowo and the then Minister of Education of the defunct Western Region, Stephen Awokoya, literally changed his fortunes. With the help of a scholarship from the Western Regional Government, not long afterwards, he was able to finally travel to the UK. It was here that he enrolled to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London from 1960 to 1962. Besides studying the preservation and restoration of antiquities, he moulded a statue of Chief Awolowo at Mancini and Tozer Studios in London. The abrupt end of the scholarship after a crisis, which engulfed Nigeria’s Western Region, left him out in the cold. Undaunted, he was still able to study casting and moulding at Mancini and Tozer Studios, worked as an art assistant at a studio owned by the Irish sculptor Edward Delaney and subsequently worked with the Croatian sculptor Oscar Nemon on five sculptors of British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill at St James studio.

Tomoloju, who presented the special exhibition brochure, titled Abayomi Barber: An Artist Born and Made, thought the allusion of Barber’s artistic experience while in the UK as “cultural assimilation” inappropriate. He would rather it be substituted with the term “cultural synthesis”. His reason? “[Barber] already had a bastion of creative motivational force in his Yoruba cultural environment which could not have been extirpated by sheer exposure to the Western mode of artistic expression. Barber will not, for instance, be compared with his francophone counterpart who, subject to the French policy of assimilation, divests himself of much of his original culture to take on more of the culture of the coloniser.”

Indeed, Barber had sufficiently asserted himself in the visual arts and music before his departure for the UK. He taught himself to sculpt, thanks to the uncommon interest he had developed during his visits to the local shrines as part of his primary school history lessons. Adding his drawing skills later to this transformed him into a full-fledged artist.

Opening his first studio in a warehouse in the southwestern Nigerian town of Ilesa with the help of his uncle, the Ooni, he not only produced sculptures of the town’s influential people but also frequently visited Lagos, which even back then was already the country’s hub of artistic activities.
When he eventually relocated to Lagos, he briefly trained under the renowned British sculptor Paul Mount at the Yaba College of Technology, where he had enrolled for a course in sculpture. It was in this city that he would experience his bloom time in the arts, lurching eventually from his visual arts practice on to other interests such as music, advertising, book illustration and interaction with the Yoruba Historical Society.

After Barber returned from the UK in 1971, he was easily absorbed as an art fellow at the University of Lagos’s School of African and Asian Studies (now Centre for Cultural Studies). It was at the tertiary institution that he produced the portrait of the visiting Ethiopian leader, Haile Selassie, his famous Yemoja paintings, his “Ali Maigoro” sculptures and his surrealistic landscapes, which adorn the walls of the National Gallery of Modern Art alongside other works. It was also here that a coterie of acolytes began to adhere to his artistic credo, which unapologetically favoured naturalism and scoffed at the Western-instigated and -sanctioned notions of what African art should be. With this group of devotees, he laid the foundations of what became his informal art school in 1973.
An exhibition of the works of the members of this informal art school, which was declared open by Omooba Yemisi Shyllon, brought the event to a close.