USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ekpo Eyo: A Tribute

A Tribute to a Prolific Scholar
By Onoyom Ukpong

 

If an art historian were to measure another's career accomplishment, an institutional power's career achievement for that matter, it would be based not as much on the effectiveness of historicity as on the commitment to it. (Even to related disciplines such as museum administration and archeology.) In this respect, accomplishment is measured on the basis of the very diligence by one of the world's most acclaimed scholars to a career marked partly by a series of art-historical and archeological accounts worth recording in a tribute to the executor.

 

Professor Ekpo Eyo did what no one had done; was committed to excavating important archeological sites in Nigeria and to recording some of the country's finest relics for public use in understanding dimensions in which artistically talented ancestors of the present day Nigerians used their hands to create works of art of abiding fascination, i.e., he was a major participant in the institutionalization of the country's treasured past, in the benefit of posterity. Therefore, fond memories of him will forever be written on my mind, as I imagine will be on the mind of many of my colleagues.

 

Onoyom Ukpong, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism

Department of Visual Arts, Humanities and Theatre

Florida A&M University

Tallahassee, FL

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Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
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