Chike Aniakor

Biography

In 1997 the National Museum of African Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, opened “Poetics of Line”, an exhibition of drawings by seven artists of the Nsukka group. Chike Aniakor was among them, and the show ran until April 1998.

Chike Cyril Aniakor was born on 21 August 1939 in Abatete, in what is now Anambra State in eastern Nigeria. His mother worked in Uli, the traditional Igbo painting in which geometric signs and patterns were applied to walls and to the body, usually for ceremonies. His interest in Igbo dance, ritual and architecture seems to have begun in childhood.

From 1960 to 1964 he studied painting at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria (later part of Ahmadu Bello University) and received a bachelor’s degree. In 1964 his work won first prize at the cultural festival of the National Union of Nigerian Students in Ibadan. Then came years of school teaching: from 1965 to 1971 he taught at the Community Secondary School in Nnobi and told his pupils about Igbo art. In 1968–1969 he worked as an art editor at the Ministry of Information in Enugu. In 1972 the National Museum in Lagos held his solo exhibition “The Visions of My Ikenga”, which he made together with Uche Okeke.

For his studies in the United States he received a scholarship from the British Council. At Indiana University in Bloomington he took a master’s degree in art history (1974) and a doctorate (1978). There he also showed paintings and poems and received several fellowships. He then taught at Southern University in New Orleans (1978–1979) and later at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Howard University. In 1984 he worked in Los Angeles as a research associate, and in the same year he received a Rockefeller Award.

From the 1970s his main place of work was the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. Together with Uche Okeke and others he created the Nsukka group, which also included El Anatsui, Olu Oguibe, Ada Udechukwu, Obiora Udechukwu and Tayo Adenaike. Aniakor was one of the first in the group to take an interest in Uli, and it is largely thanks to this that the group came to be associated with that manner. He founded the art department at the university. In 1986–1988 he directed the university’s Institute of African Studies, in 1994–1995 he was a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and in 1996 he worked at the African Studies Center of Howard University, on oral literature. He returned to Nsukka in 1995 and taught until his retirement in 2005. He took part in the work of the Society of Nigerian Artists.

His best-known book is “Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos”, written with Herbert Cole, with a foreword by Chinua Achebe. His other works include “Igbo Architecture” (1979), “Igbo Household Objects” (1988) and the collection “Reflective Essays on Art & Art History” (2005). In all he has more than 75 books and articles, as well as a small body of free-verse poetry, which he regarded as an extension of his drawings.

As an artist Aniakor works mainly in pen, ink and watercolour. He tried to renew Uli by turning away from European models: light, winding lines, dense masses, and empty space treated as part of the composition. In his drawings of the Nigerian Civil War (the war over Biafra) people crowd together, faces look like masks, bodies are elongated. “Descent of the Falcon” (1993, a line etching) shows a falcon above an anxious crowd; the artist himself linked the subject to the relationship between government and people under military regimes. “Seasonal Ritual” (1990) is built as a circle of people around a small group at the centre. It seems to me that the centre can be read in two ways, and Aniakor himself allowed both readings: as the organisation of a community and as a vague plan with an unpredictable outcome.

His works are held by the National Museum of African Art of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art in Lagos, the Asele Institute in Nimo, the Didi Museum in Lagos, Iwalewa House in Bayreuth and the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt. In 2025 his works were shown in the exhibition “Nigerian Modernism: Art and Independence” at Tate Modern in London.