tagged (2015 - 2020) 

These are interesting times to be a professional artist in Nigeria, and no doubt, in Africa.  Having made the plunge into the art world six years ago, learning how to swim and navigate my way through this watery landscape has been an emotional and rewarding game of sorts. In response, I created the series Tagged (2015–17), where swimmers engage in a game to get a red ball, which symbolizes the red stickers placed on sold artworks. I have found this transactional assessment of an artwork’s value to be both an important method of validation and a trap, painting only a partial picture of what it means to thrive as a professional artist.

Last year, I read an article by Kenyan collagist and painter Wangechi Mutu, called “They Eat Because You Grow the Food.” The article describes Mutu’s path to becoming a professional artist and offers advice to younger artists about navigating the art world and recognizing one’s position in the food chain as the “growers of the food”:

“If I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self that everything is basically going to be OK. […] I would also have reminded myself that I hadn’t got to the point where I was emerging as an artist by chance; that I’d worked tremendously hard and made a lot of good decisions to arrive where I was.”

Mutu bares her misconceptions about the mentors and art communities she had assumed would automatically appear upon launching career. Rather, she advises, artists must do the hard work of building a community from scratch that supports and reflects their idiosyncrasies. Much like Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, I often refer to, and have taken these words to heart as I mature as an artist.

In a similar spirit to Rilke and Mutu’s words of advice, I started a mentorship program called Dear Young Artist. I mentored a group of four emerging artists, focusing on the importance of long-term strategy (“staying in the pool!”) as well as things like finance and time- and relationship-management that artists often shy away from. It felt at times presumptuous to assume a role of a teacher, as one who is still young in their career and self-taught, but the relationship turned out to be mutually beneficial. I am now a something of a mentor to my artist assistants and they are in turn very generous with their support of my work and vision. Much like the concept of the Synchronized Swimmers (below), I actually feel like I’m building the kind of community Mutu referred to. And together, we are asking some important questions: what does it mean to be an African artist, a woman artist, a young artist? What are the keys to professionalism and success? Dear Young Artist also provides the name for a series of paintings in which I engage with these questions.

This series is an exploration of the charged relationship between an artist and the art world. Modupeola elaborates on her own experience of this environment: 

“In the art world, the elusive “red dot” represents the sale of an artwork and is part of a complex system of approval, status and taste to collectors, dealers and artists alike."

 The artist explains: “An artist’s creation is an extension of themselves, thus their artworks mirror their inner workings, desires and fears. In this series, I explore the idea of visibility, exclusivity, ownership and selling artwork as competing interests. The decision to use the pool, as the context for play is very deliberate, as feelings about it differ vastly. The pendulum swings from feelings of calm, luxury, and ease to fatigue, risk, and death. Large bodies of water, like art, represent our internal capacity to be deeply moved by something. When someone commits money to buy art, it is an indication, that they were moved by an aspect of the work.”

The use of the red circle points to a less esoteric mode of validation, the exchange or purchase of artwork and its official stamp of approval.In addition to recognizing the commercial mode of validation that exists in the art world, this way of looking assumes an aesthetic experience or even a theoretical appreciation. And yet, she reasons that because artwork is so often an intense expression of the creator’s most profound feelings, then the artist’s need for the external validation “is perhaps the most dangerous game of all.”

There are many players determining this symbolic value - both active participants and observers. Blissfully unaware of the gatekeepers that govern this space, they swim, float, and coast along in the water. In the game, there are only two rules:

1.  Stay in the pool.

2. (Pretend to) ignore the red ball

Rosa J.H. Berland and Modupeola Fadugba, 2015