Marcia Kure

Biography

The series “History of Africa by Fela” (2001–2003) has 59 panels. Marcia Kure made them in ink, pencil and kolanut pigment, and the title points to the musician Fela Kuti. For an artist who grew up in Nigeria and later lived outside it, this material proved essential: she often uses kola and coffee in place of store-bought paints.

Kure was born in 1970 in Kano State, in northern Nigeria. She studied at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, under Obiora Udechukwu and in 1994 received a Bachelor of Arts degree in painting. That same year she was awarded the Uche Okeke Prize for Drawing. Her early work dealt with political violence and the role of women in patriarchal society. Later the centre of attention shifted to motherhood, haute couture, hip-hop aesthetics and the experience of living away from home. Her graphic work has strong links to contemporary uli. This is the name for a linear graphic tradition of Igbo women in eastern Nigeria that uses very little colour. Kure’s drawings are built on broad, rounded strokes, bold shapes and decorative motifs drawn from a range of African traditions.

The image of a veiled woman first appeared in her work “Purdah” (1992) and has returned constantly since. Kure adds textile to it in order to speak about the relationship between gender and power. In “Woman as Warrior” (1997) the figure is given attributes usually associated with male authority.

Her work was first shown in New York in 1995, in a group exhibition at the Skoto Gallery. In 1997 she took part in the exhibition “Cross/ing: Time • Space • Movement”, curated by Olu Oguibe, which presented African artists working in different countries. Her solo exhibition “Cloth as Identity” (2000) at the Goethe-Institut in Lagos included a performance in which women in burkas danced to Afrobeat in a hip-hop manner. In 2002 one of her works was included in the “African Artists of the Future” calendar published by Multichoice Africa. In 2004 Kure received the Elena Prentice Rulon-Miller Scholarship Fund award and the Minority Work Study Grant at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and in the same year did a teaching internship at St. Mark’s School in Southborough, Massachusetts. In 2007–2008 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and a Program Puffin Grant from the Puffin Foundation for the sculpture “Burqua as Shelter”.

She took part in the Sharjah International Biennial (2005), the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville (2006, curated by Okwui Enwezor) and La Triennale (2013). Her work has been shown at the New Museum in New York, Barbican Art Galleries in London, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston. In all, she has had eight solo exhibitions and more than forty group exhibitions.

From January to March 2014 she was artist-in-residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2019 she taught at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery (New York), Purdy Hicks Gallery (London) and Officine Dell’Immagine (Milan). She works in Princeton, New Jersey, and in Abuja and Kaduna.

In a 2015 interview with ARTCTUALITE she said that she preferred the “gray area” between opposites. To my mind, this goes some way to explain her joining of Western techniques with African pigments and forms.