Chika Okeke-Agulu: Freedom Bird

SMO Contemporary, in partnership with the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, presents Chika Okeke-Agulu: Freedom Bird, the first major survey of Chika Okeke-Agulu’s artistic practice. Bringing together paintings, drawings, and sculptures produced over more than three decades, the exhibition examines the artist’s sustained engagement with the political and social conditions of postcolonial Nigeria.
Okeke-Agulu’s practice emerged during the turbulence of military rule in Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s. His work developed in response to state repression, the erosion of civic life, democratic struggle, and the precarious position of artists and intellectuals within an increasingly hostile political environment. Following his relocation to the United States, questions of migration, exile, memory, and cultural displacement became increasingly central to his work.
Taking its title from a recurring figure in the artist’s visual and poetic vocabulary, Freedom Bird considers freedom as an aspiration continually negotiated through political struggle, personal memory, and artistic form. The body of work presented in this exhibition explores how artists develop languages adequate to experiences of repression and displacement, and how migration transforms relationships to place, identity, and history.
Although Okeke-Agulu is widely recognised as an art historian, curator, and critic, Freedom Bird places his work as an artist at the centre. His paintings, drawings, and sculptures are presented alongside selected poems, diary entries, photographs, and archival documents, situating the works within the intellectual, political, and personal contexts from which they emerged.
Spanning the artist’s career from the late 1980s to the present, the exhibition traces the development of a practice shaped by the unfinished questions of Nigeria’s postcolonial history. It reflects on military dictatorship, democratic aspiration, civic fracture, and the continuing movement of young Nigerians forced to seek futures elsewhere. At the same time, it considers the role of the artist as witness, critic, and participant in public life.