1985–present
Modupeola Fadugba
Modupeola Fadugba (born 1985) grew up in a family of Nigerian diplomats, trained as an economist and educator, and came to painting as a self-taught artist. She is known for series about swimming and water, made with a technique of burning the surface. Her work has been shown in Lagos, London, Paris and New York, and in 2016 it was recognised at the Dakar Biennale.
Biography
In 2016 the Dakar Biennale, the Senegalese biennial of contemporary African art, selected work from across the continent. Among those chosen was Modupeola Fadugba, who received a Grand Prize there from the Senegalese Minister of Communication.
She was born in 1985 in Lomé, Togo. Her parents were Nigerian diplomats, so her childhood and youth were spent mostly in England and the United States. Her education was not in art: economics, engineering and education. She received an MA in Economics from the University of Delaware and an MEd from Harvard University. She never studied drawing or painting formally and calls herself self-taught; she lives and works in Nigeria. Her first notable milestone was the project “The People’s Algorithm”, which received the El Anatsu Outstanding Production Prize in 2014. In 2015 she took part in the group show Art Energy in London. In 2017 she had several solo exhibitions at once: “Heads Up, Keep Swimming” at Temple Muse in Lagos, “Synchronised Swimming & Drowning” at Ed Cross Fine Art in London, and “Prayers, Players & Swimmers” at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. That same year her work was in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London and in “Afriques Capitales” in Lille. Her painting “Teach Us How To Shoki In Pink” appeared on the cover of the Arabian edition of Harper’s Bazaar in April 2018.
Her best-known series is about water. In the summer of 2018, during a residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, she met the Harlem Honeys & Bears. This is a synchronised swimming team for older African Americans that meets at the Hansborough Recreation Center in New York and has existed since 1979; in 2018 it had 24 active members aged from 58 to 95. The research produced a series of paintings and an installation, “Dreams from the Deep End”. They were first shown at Gallery 1957 in Accra, Ghana, and the series was then presented in New York in 2018, where it was reviewed in Artforum International.
In the paintings the swimmers are shown in and around the pool. Some figures remain faceless and others have faces; the colours are mostly pastel. The artist’s signature is burning: she burns the surface, and the technique appears in both kinds of picture. The water in the pool is usually a single colour, dark blue, black or gold, so the figures stand out sharply against the background. The subject is no accident for her. In the United States, swimming is bound up with race and social justice: according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drowning among Black children is 1.4 times more frequent than among white children, and in swimming pools the difference rises to 5.5 times. Researchers explain this as a legacy of segregation, when public swimming pools were closed to Black people. For the artist herself, water is tied to a childhood fear of the ocean, which she overcame only at eleven, when her school made her attend swimming lessons.
Her works are in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the University of Delaware, the Sindika Dokolo Foundation and the Liberian president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. In 2020 she held a Smithsonian Institution research fellowship and in the same year had a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts.
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