Okwui Enwezor
The Curator as Cosmic Bridge
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
and
ChatGPT
( This is another version by ChatGPT of my wholly self written essay earlier published)
Okwui Enwezor from Phaidon
I first came across the name Okwui Enwezor over two decades ago, in a newspaper calling on Nigerian photographers to submit work for Documenta, the international art exhibition he was curating. His name struck me with the force of myth—an Igbo name, unapologetically African, etched at the summit of a Western-dominated art world.
How did he get there? How did someone without formal training in art, armed only with a political science degree and a hunger for vision, come to lead some of the most important art institutions and projects on the planet?
Enwezor was not just a man of intellect—though he had that in abundance. He was a weaver of networks, a conductor of cultural energies. He could move between the solitude of thought and the sparkle of global salons, between Lagos, New York, and Berlin. He was both rooted and nomadic, fierce and diplomatic, poetic and strategic.
Through Nka journal, through his historic exhibitions, through his collaborative dance with scholars like Chika Okeke-Agulu, he carved a pathway for African and diasporic art not as peripheral, but as central to the global story of creativity. And in doing so, he showed us something more: that art is a spiritual journey, a way of transcending boundaries, a call toward inner and outer transformation.
Okwui passed in 2019, far too soon. But he left behind a constellation—ideas, images, relationships—that still shimmer with meaning. To study him is to study what it means to live with vision, to work with grace, to dream at scale.
If you knew him, read him, or were touched by his work, let us keep the conversation alive. His story is not just history. It is invitation.
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