1943–present
Jimoh Buraimoh
Jimoh Buraimoh came out of the workshops that Ulli and Georgina Beier ran in Osogbo in the 1960s and became one of the best-known artists of that school. He devised his own bead painting: strings of glass beads glued to a wooden panel, with motifs from Yoruba beaded crowns. He also makes mosaics and murals, and has taught in Nigeria and the United States.
Biography
In 1967 the Goethe-Institut in Lagos showed Jimoh Buraimoh’s first bead paintings. Glass beads threaded on strings were glued to wooden panels, and the designs were suggested by Yoruba beaded crowns and ceremonial fabrics. In the late 1960s, as the artist himself says, he tried out epoxy glues to make the technique practicable.
He is called the first bead painter in Africa. Such a claim to priority is hard to verify, but in Nigeria the technique is indeed associated with his name.
Jimoh Adetunji Buraimoh was born in 1943 in Osogbo, in south-western Nigeria. He first trained as an electrician, and from 1964 worked as a lighting technician in the theatre of the playwright Duro Ladipo. The same year he joined the workshop that Georgina Beier ran in Osogbo; these classes, begun together with Ulli Beier, gave the town a whole group of artists, later known as the Osogbo school. In 1965 he toured Britain, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany with Ladipo’s company. From 1968 to 1972 Buraimoh worked at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), and in 1972 he was artist-in-residence at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. That same year he represented Nigeria at the First All-Africa Trade Fair in Nairobi. In 1974 he taught at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, and later gave classes in Bloomington and at schools in New York, Boston and Los Angeles. His work was shown in Lagos in 1977 at FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. Gradually mosaics and murals joined the beadwork; he became the first Nigerian to be admitted to an international association of mosaic artists.
One of his most prominent public works is in Atlanta. The mosaic “Meeting of Elders” in Howell Park, in the West End district, is regarded as the park’s principal mosaic, and in 2024 the city’s BeltLine programme singled it out as an important landmark of Nigerian art in the city. Buraimoh’s works are also in museum collections, for example the Yale University Art Gallery. In 2000 his book “The Heritage: My Life and Arts” was published in Lagos.
Buraimoh holds the traditional title of chief. On 6 November 2024 the United States Mission in Nigeria presented him with the U.S. Exchange Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award, together with Nike Davies-Okundaye and Bruce Onobrakpeya.
Profile notes