Ulli Beier passed on yesterday in his house in Sydney, Australia.  His first son, Sebastian, sent me an email yesterday, and I spoke with him last night.

Some of you will remember that Ulli spent several days on campus in 1999 — gave the CLR James Lecture, visited several classes.  And some years ago, the Brush Gallery showed his photographs of Mbari Houses.  As we say in Nigeria, a mighty tree has fallen.

You may want to read the announcement in a Nigerian daily (see link below) — not many people know that Ulli taught Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka (both also visited SLU in 2000).

Ulli Beier, founder of Osogbo arts school dies at 89 (Sun News Online)

While doing research today, I came across a thoughtfully written blog called Emotan by Tola Adenle.  She wrote about Ulli Beier and the Beier collection of Yoruba textiles and photographs at Amherst College.  Amherst organized the exhibition “Cloth Only Wears to Shreds,” which was presented at the Brush Art Gallery in 2005, alongside work by Chika Okeke-Agulu and Marcia Kure.

Image credit: Tola Adenle.

From the ROM, “In the 1970s, Anatsui began to manipulate broken ceramic fragments. With their allusions to ancient Nok terracotta sculptures, West African myths about the earth, and cultural references to the use of clay, the ceramic works piece together shattered ideas and histories. His wooden sculptures from this period created by chopping, carving, burning and etching, allude to signs and symbols from various cultures and languages from across the globe.

The 1990s marked a crucial shift from working with hand tools to carving with a power saw, which enabled the artist to cut through blocks of wood, leaving a jagged surface. In some compositions these dramatic incisions stand for the scars left by the European colonial encounter with Africa.

The colours and patterns in Anatsui’s gestural acrylic paintings and ink drawings, made at various points during his career and shown here outside of Nigeria for the first time, resonate with his work in other materials. These vibrant and beautiful works subtly unify the retrospective, referencing Anatsui’s larger themes and revealing much about the artist’s process over nearly 40 years.”

Tanda is shown here with, left to right, El Anatsui, Chika Okeke-Agulu, and the well-known international curator, Okwui Enwezor.

A term that comes up in this regard is “rich metadata,” i.e., information beyond “artist,” “title,” “medium,” etc.  Rich metadata is descriptive, interpretive information about digital images.  It’s the material that provides a means of access to understanding works of art. Our curator of visual resources, Jessica Bailey, wrote this about Uzo Egonu after having cataloged his 52 prints.

Uzo Egonu’s work is powerful and easy to admire but also challenging to place within the usual contexts of art criticism: the social, historical, geographic and cultural. His art is both accessible and representative, although it was created while he was often detached either literally or figuratively from the peoples, places and events he depicted.  This unique combination of qualities, and how to explain their co-existence, should make Egonu an especially attractive subject for teachers and scholars.

Egonu spent most of his life as an outsider, both culturally (living and working in England, far from his native Nigeria) and as an artist, experimenting with contemporary styles but never solely defined by them and hardly recognized within the ranks of Modernism or Post-Modernism. In particular, his oeuvre raises questions about the intrinsic and the influential (i.e., the nature versus the “nurturing” of an artist) and embodies a distinct sensitivity for the human experience of separation and isolation as well as connection. Egonu’s work is an excellent source for exploring a wide range of topics and concepts including Igbo culture, the Nigerian Civil War, Postcolonialism, gender roles, metaphor, and Western reception, interpretation and consumption of African art in the twentieth century.

“Strangers in their Own Land” by Uzo Egonu

Jessica holds a M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and a B.A. in English from Penn State, where she worked with one of the artists in the AKALA project, Chika Okeke-Agulu.  She cataloged hundreds of examples of art from Yoruba, Nok, Igbo, and other West African cultures for Dr. Okeke-Agulu’s personal teaching collection and for the Penn State Department of Art History’s digital image collection.

With regard to blogging, I often refer back to a quote from Eric Janssen (NITLE) that he shared when he came to St. Lawrence to talk about teaching with technology in a liberal arts environment. “The process is the product.” It is a statement so simple on the one hand and one that has held true for every digital image collection I’ve worked on in the past few years. What better way to document both as we move forward on this project.