A Colossal Artist
Bruce Onobrakpeya and the Dearth of Scholarship Equal to the Achievement of this Great Figure
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
The Nigerian master, Bruce Onobrakpeya, born 1932, is one of the world's great artists.
He achieved prominence from 1958 as a founding member of a pioneering school in African art, the Zaria Rebels, and held his first one person exhibition in 1959.
Volume of Onobrakpeya Scholarship
His work is comparable in scope and power with that of his fellow Nigerian artist, the writer Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, but the scholarship on Onobrakpeya's work is very limited.
Central to Onobrakpeya scholarship is the work of Dele Jegede, such as his contribution to Bruce Onobrakpeya : The Spirit in Ascent and the recent Onobrakpeya: Masks of Flaming Arrows but he seems to be alone in consistent attention to the master's output.
There do exist some impressive books on Onobrakpeya's art but most of them seem to be sponsored by the artist's organization, suggesting his work is not attracting the scope of attention it should from scholars independent of the artist's efforts.
Onobrakpeya on JSTOR, Facebook, Google, Amazon and Wikipedia
My search on JSTOR, a leading, if not the leading journal archive, through both its Google link and its own website, brought up not up to 10 hits on Onobrakpeya.
My Facebook search for Onobrakpeya gave more hits but most were news reports and some presentations of his work.
My Facebook search for Onobrakpeya gave more hits but most were news reports and some presentations of his work.
My Google search on his name brought up many images demonstrating the scope of his work in terms of media and orientation, but little analysis of that work.
My Amazon.com search gave 23 hits, some of them on books dedicated to his work.
From what I can see from his Wikipedia page most of the scholarly works listed on his art are unpublished academic theses.
My Amazon.com search gave 23 hits, some of them on books dedicated to his work.
From what I can see from his Wikipedia page most of the scholarly works listed on his art are unpublished academic theses.
From the information on the Onobrakpeya Foundation blog, not all the books on him are readily visible online.
Comparison With Anselm Kiefer
Now let us compare with Anselm Kiefer, a German artist who may be correlated with Onobrakpeya in terms of their large scale productions and adaptation of esoteric forms, as Onobrakpeya does with what I expect is Urhobo ritual art and Kiefer does with with the Jewish and Western esoteric system Kabbalah, this aspect of their art being what drew me to both of them.
Comparison With Anselm Kiefer
Now let us compare with Anselm Kiefer, a German artist who may be correlated with Onobrakpeya in terms of their large scale productions and adaptation of esoteric forms, as Onobrakpeya does with what I expect is Urhobo ritual art and Kiefer does with with the Jewish and Western esoteric system Kabbalah, this aspect of their art being what drew me to both of them.
Kiefer was born 1945 and had his first solo exhibition in 1969, ten years after Onbrakpeya had his.
My Amazon search for Anselm Kiefer gave 367 hits, with what seemed to be 20 pages dedicated to his work alone or in comparison with that of philosophers and poets.
My JSTOR search for Kiefer from the Google search link gave 1, 090 results while my search from the JSTOR website itself brought up 1, 162 hits in 47 pages.
Summation and Suggestions
What is going on?
My JSTOR search for Kiefer from the Google search link gave 1, 090 results while my search from the JSTOR website itself brought up 1, 162 hits in 47 pages.
Summation and Suggestions
What is going on?
Various things.
My understanding of some of the issues involved are more speculative than certain while others are more certain than speculative.
To facilitate scholarship on Onobrakpeya's work, though, a rich and carefully organized online archive is vital.
Such an archive should include images of all his work to date, organized in terms of year of creation, medium and subject matter, those being the categories I understand as particularly relevant for his work.
Such an archive should include images of all his work to date, organized in terms of year of creation, medium and subject matter, those being the categories I understand as particularly relevant for his work.
Information on the inspirational context of his work is also vital.
The Onobrakpeya Foundation currently uses a blog and a Facebook page but the blog is inadequate on account of the limitations of serialised presentation of information necessitated by the blog format while the Facebook page could do better in organizing the information on the subject in a manner that will enable it's easy study.
The Onobrakpeya Foundation currently uses a blog and a Facebook page but the blog is inadequate on account of the limitations of serialised presentation of information necessitated by the blog format while the Facebook page could do better in organizing the information on the subject in a manner that will enable it's easy study.
Images
The cover image shows Bruce Onobrakpeya with one of his installations.
The other pictures are of various works of Onobrakpeya's.
Also posted on
Walks of Art blog
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