The EMOWAA (Edo Museum of West African Art) Trust is delighted to announce the appointments of Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu, Nigerian art historian and Professor of African and African Diaspora Art at and Director of the Program of African Studies at Princeton University and Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford University, as Senior Advisor, Modern and Contemporary Art and Nigerian-British curator Aindrea Emelife as the new Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
The EMOWAA (Edo Museum of West African Art) Trust is delighted to announce the appointments of Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu, Nigerian art historian and Professor of African and African Diaspora Art at and Director of the Program of African Studies at Princeton University and Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford University, as Senior Advisor, Modern and Contemporary Art and Nigerian-British curator Aindrea Emelife as the new Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
advancing the field of academic research in contemporary and modern West African Art
developing the collection strategy for EMOWAA
building the curatorial framework for the creative district EMOWAA is developing in the heart of Benin City
and generating new, multi-faceted narratives and interpretations of West African art and history.
Chika Okeke-AguluProfessor Chika Okeke-Agulu is an artist, critic and art historian who specialises in indigenous, modern, and contemporary African and African Diaspora art history and theory. Born in Umuahia, Nigeria, Professor Okeke-Agulu earned an MFA (Painting) from the University of Nigeria and a PhD (Art History) from Emory University. He has spent much of his career working at several institutions around the world and currently serves as the Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies as well as the Director, Program in African Studies and Director, Africa World Initiative at Princeton University. He is also the current Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford University 2022/23.
Aindrea EmelifeEmelife, prior to joining EMOWAA, studied History of Art to post-graduate level at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. As a curator and art historian, she has led a number of high-profile projects with a focus on modern and contemporary art, dedicating her focus to questions around colonial and decolonial histories in Africa, transnationalism and the politics of representation. Recent exhibitions include Black Venus, a survey of the legacy of the Black woman in visual culture, which opened at Fotografiska NY in 2022 and will tour to MOAD (San Francisco, USA) in early April and Somerset House (London, UK) this July. Emelife’s first book, A Brief History of Protest Art, was published by Tate in March 2022 and she is currently working on her second book with Thames & Hudson, which debuts in 2024. She has contributed essays to several publications, most recently Revisiting Modern British Art (Lund Humphries, 2022). In 2021, Emelife was appointed to the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm. Emelife is a Trustee of New Curators.
Anna Melnykova, "Palace of Labor (palats praci), architector I. Pretro, 1916", shot with analog Canon camera, 35 mm Fuji film in March 2022.
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