Uche Okeke

Uche Okeke

Uche Okeke

B. 1933 Nimo, Nigeria

D. 2016 Lagos Nigeria

Uche Okeke emerged at the twilight of British colonialism and the arrival of political independence in Nigeria, which came in 1960.

Okeke, along with a few other artists, then invented a modernist vocabulary that drew from the indigenous aesthetic traditions and worldview of the Igbo, his ethnic group, combining them with his formal exposure to artistic sensibilities from elsewhere in what he termed “natural synthesis.”

Okeke’s work is featured in the ongoing exhibition Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club at the New Orleans Museum of Art from February - May 2023, which later travels to the Toledo Museum of Art. As a signifier of his importance as an icon of African modernism, his work was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.