International

From fishing village to Forest Gardens…

By Aarti wa Njoroge

According to the BBC, ‘Africa 05 is the biggest celebration of African culture ever organised in Britain’[1]. So, given the number of African artists that deserve attention, I was somewhat bemused to discover that the current Africa 05 artist-in-residence is Jamaican.

The former artist-in-residence is several hundred years closer to being African. Reggie Pedro belongs to the Urhobo tribe of the Niger River Delta in Nigeria, though he was born and brought up in England and does not speak his native language. His first and only trip to Nigeria was in 1988.

What makes an artist African? No doubt there are differing opinions on this. Reggie thinks of black culture in the Caribbean, the Americas and elsewhere as being a derivative of its African roots and reminds me that displaced cultures can continue practicing their customs strictly (as people of Yoruba descent do in Cuba and Brazil) while back 'home' these traditions move on. My own opinion is that the organisers of Africa 05 should have been more restrictive in their definition. Organise a West Indies 06 or a Black Culture in Britain 07 if you want to include the diaspora, but at least keep the spotlight on African artists in 2005.

Nevertheless I wanted to meet Reggie to understand how his dual heritage has impacted his art and so I went along to his north London mews studio.

Finding painting messy at first, Reggie started drawing. His parents encouraged him, especially when he continued his studies at degree level. (He had not heard of Aina Onabolu, who was responsible for introducing art education into schools in his country of origin in the 1920s despite colonialism.) Reggie first graduated in fine art and painting. He then went on to the Royal College of Art to do a master’s in illustration. Between 1998 and 2000, he was commissioned to produce fifteen record/CD covers for Gomez, a blues and rock bank from northern England. He has also done magazine illustrations – one of his subjects being Bruce Lee.

At times, Reggie feels his art can be “sub-consciously African”; other times it is “more obvious”. Chris Ofili, the 1988 Turner Prize winner, has a more obvious “African” influence, he says. Reggie’s work is semi-abstract, and so a specific place can be less important than the concept. This is particularly the case in FireLove, which is a romantic depiction of a black couple, with their backs to us, as if they are having a private conversation. Physically, the setting could be anywhere. The fire in the background could be taken to be an African sunset, or a European one. It is also the fire, the energy, of love.

Ultimately, Reggie wants to divert people’s attention away from the fire of bullets so often associated with young black people. He paints images of black people and ordinary urban inner city life. In Smiley, I am initially drawn to the coin-operated launderette. We talk about the inspiration his trip to Cuba gave to him, and it is clear that while he embraces what appears mundane, within the same image, he also brings out something positive. In the case of Smiley, the elated face in the top left-hand corner is elevated above his environment. Perhaps he has an Urhobo iphri somewhere… Of course this positivism movement (if we can call if that) is not unique to contemporary art created by Urhobos, but in his 1972 painting Udju Mara (Family Goes to the Farm), Bruce Onobrakpeya, an Urhobo from Nigeria, used a typical rural scene to “[focus] on the dignity of labor”.[2]

When we discuss the fact that Africans are traditionally not used to investing in art for art’s sake, Reggie feels that, in Africa, art is part of a lifestyle, the décor of a house… Africans do not expect to go into a gallery and purchase art. The Washington Post makes similar remarks about an Urhobo exhibition currently on at the National Museum of African Art in the USA: “’art’ in the contemporary Western sense […] involves self-expression, formal innovation and, quite often, audacious marketing. The wooden [Urhobo] sculptures were made for ceremonial purposes to honor elders, ancestors, brides and mothers, nature spirits and others in the eternal cycle of life.”[3]

A growing African middle class with disposable wealth, I suspect, is still investing in land and modern material trappings such as cars. As for the arts in the UK, Reggie has concerns. For example, black music of substance is being bypassed, though he does not know why, and the public are presented with shallow remnants.

Perhaps when he goes to Nigeria at the end of the year, Reggie will, as a non-resident, observe life in the way he has observed it on his other travels. We will see how it translates into his art.

a_wa_njoroge@yahoo.com