Ezumeezu: Essays on Nigerian Art and Architecture - a Festschrift in Honour of Demas Nwoko

Ezumeezu, edited by Obiora Udechukwu and Chika Okeke-Agulu, is a festschrift for Demas Nwoko, the influential Nigerian artist, architect, designer and politician. It is an unprecedented compilation of essays by important art critics, historians, artists, writers and scholars on the work of Demas Nwoko, and on Nigerian art, architecture, literature and art administration. Over the last two decades the constitutive history of modernism has irrevocably expanded, and so have names of the artists who have defined its multifarious contours. These changes did not come about through a change of heart in narrow art history, but out of an intervention from inside the practice of art by experimental artists and thinkers like Demas Nwoko, whose visionary, uncompromising avant-gardism, like Corbusier's, defies the dichotomy between artist and architect. Demas Nwoko is a unique figure, in his expansive modernism and distinctive contemporaneity. The contributions in Ezumeezu demonstrate the richness of his storied career. This is a book anyone serious about the study of modern art must have on the shelf. Okwui Enwezor, Director, Haus der Kunst, Munich A proper homage to a well-deserving African modernist. Written by leading scholars, this collection of essays offers a comprehensive perspective on Nigerian modernism and its evolution. It fills a serious gap in the critical literature on the modernist experience in African art. It is a must read for scholars of contemporary art and architecture, and for those interested in the development of modernity and modernism outside the western metropolis. Salah M. Hassan Goldwin Smith Professor of Art History, and Director, Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University