"Freedom Bird grew out of a sustained engagement with Chika Okeke-Agulu's work and the historical and intellectual questions surrounding the generation of artists shaped by the Nsukka School and Nigeria's turbulent postcolonial history. The exhibition allows us to encounter Chika not only through the lens of his celebrated scholarship, but through the paintings, drawings and sculptures through which he has negotiated memory, politics, migration and freedom. Presenting this body of work at YSMA is particularly meaningful because of the museum's commitment to connecting art with research, education and public discourse."
Dr. Iheanyi Onwuegbucha
The Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art (YSMA), Pan-Atlantic University, and SMO Contemporary Art are set to present Chika Okeke-Agulu: Freedom Bird, a major survey of the Nigerian artist and scholar's practice spanning more than three decades, from November 1, 2026 to January 31, 2027. Curated by Dr. Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, with Sandra Mbanefo-Obiago as Associate Curator, the retrospective solo exhibition will bring together paintings, drawings and sculptures alongside selected poems, diary entries, photographs and archival materials that illuminate the intellectual, political and personal contexts behind the artist's work.
The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter Chika Okeke-Agulu not only as one of the most influential scholars, critics and curators of African art, but first and foremost as an artist whose practice has been shaped by the political and social realities of postcolonial Nigeria. His work emerged during the turbulence of military rule in the 1980s and 1990s, engaging questions of repression, civic life, democratic struggle and the position of artists and intellectuals in a changing Nigeria. His subsequent migration to the United States introduced further questions of exile, memory, displacement and belonging into his artistic vocabulary.
The title, Freedom Bird, is drawn from a recurring figure in Okeke-Agulu's visual and poetic vocabulary and speaks to freedom as an aspiration continually negotiated through political struggle, personal memory and artistic expression. Across works produced from the late 1980s to the present, the exhibition traces an evolving artistic language through which the artist reflects on Nigeria's postcolonial experience, from military dictatorship and democratic aspiration to civic fracture, migration and the continuing movement of Nigerians in search of new futures.