Dele Jegede

Biography

The comic strip “Kole Omole” ran in Nigeria in the 1980s, and its hero was a five-year-old boy. Through the child Dele Jegede allowed himself cautious jabs at the military regime; an adult would have got away with it less often.

He was born in 1945 in Ikere-Ekiti, in Ekiti State. He took his first degree in fine arts (painting, first-class honours) in 1973 at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. Soon afterwards he began working as a cartoonist and painter. From 1974 to 1977 he was art editor of the Daily Times, the country’s most influential daily newspaper, and he went on publishing weekly cartoons in the Sunday Times until the end of the 1970s. His cartoons commented on the excesses of the privileged and on social and political issues; the art historian Aderonke Adesanya calls them “copious sketches of the skeleton of nation”. In 1977 Jegede joined the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Lagos and took part in organizing the cultural programme of the Second World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77). He started there as a junior research fellow and left in 1992 as director of the centre. His colleagues included the composers Akin Euba and Lazarus Ekwueme and the theatre figure Bode Osanyin. In painting, Jegede departed from the social genre that dominated at the time: he introduced satire and chose themes of social and political import, as in his 1991 exhibition on Lagos.

From 1979 to 1983 he studied at Indiana University in Bloomington under Roy Sieber, where he received his master’s degree and doctorate. His dissertation, “Trends in Contemporary Nigerian Art” (1983), is built around the work of Bruce Onobrakpeya and Twins Seven Seven. By the account of his biography, it was the first study devoted exclusively to contemporary Nigerian art. After returning home, he revived “Kole Omole”.

In 1989 Jegede was elected president of the Society of Nigerian Artists, succeeding Solomon Wangboje. In three years he secured a legal charter for the society, created chapters in the states, organized a major exhibition, “Images of the Nigerian Nation”, with a catalogue of the same title, and led the campaign for a National Gallery of Art.

In 1993 he accepted an offer from Indiana State University in Terre Haute and moved to the United States. There he developed and taught courses in studio art and art history. In 1987–1988 he had been a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Spelman College in Atlanta, where he curated the exhibition “Art By Metamorphosis”; in 1995 he was a senior post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. From 2002 to 2005 he was professor and chair of the Department of Art at Indiana State University, and from 2005 to 2010 professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He retired in May 2015 with the title of professor emeritus. His publications include “Contemporary African Art: Five Artists, Diverse Trends” (Indianapolis, 2000), entries in the “Encyclopedia of African American Artists” (2009), the book “Bruce Onobrakpeya: Mask of the Flaming Arrows” (which he edited, Milan, 2014) and the catalogues of his solo exhibitions “Peregrinations” (Lagos, 2011) and “Transitions” (Austin, 2016). His critique of Jean Pigozzi’s collection, described as the world’s largest collection of contemporary African art, provoked a dispute: Thomas McEvilley held that Jegede had lived away from Africa for too long, while Elizabeth Harney called that argument essentialist.

His works are in the National Gallery of Art in Nigeria, in the collections of the company John Holt, the University of Lagos, the Lagos State government and the National Council for Arts and Culture, as well as in private collections in Nigeria and the United States. He received the Distinguished Africanist Award of the University of Texas. In 2017 he was inducted into the Ikere Hall of Fame, and in 2018 into the Hall of Fame of the Society of Nigerian Artists, among the first twenty, a group that included Ben Enwonwu, Yusuf Grillo and Demas Nwoko. He is now chairman of the board of trustees of the Cartoonists Association of Nigeria (CARTAN).