How a beloved Lagos art fair keeps showing up for fans

💡 What does Art X Lagos seek to accomplish? We introduced it as an art fair and have evolved it considerably over the last three years. We still present the leading galleries from across Africa and the diaspora. But now a huge part of the fair is looking to a multidisciplinary experience leveraging film, music, literature, publications, and special projects.

💡 What specific things have changed? We’ve gone from showing one to two works of video art to launching Art X Cinema — taking a section of the fair and turning it into a cinema screening room for our audiences to encounter some of the very best works of film by really innovative filmmakers of African descent and of African origin. We have now invited filmmakers into the world of Art X Lagos, positioning them as storytellers alongside the visual artists.

💡 Is African art making money? We’ve seen major rises in the valuation of art from African artists over the past ten years. An artist today working on the African continent can have a very global career even while living in Africa. But while events like the $3 million sale of Njideka Akunyili-Crosby’s paintings lead to more attention on African art, we come to it from a place of a true love and appreciation for our culture and how that culture speaks to our heritage and identity. Monetary gains certainly help to establish the fact that there is a market and business opportunity here, but that is not our why.

💡 What should African art transmit to society? In an ideal world, we should strive for art that empowers a vision for Africa’s future. Our theme this year is ‘Promised Lands’. There is a backdrop of difficulty and challenges around us in Africa. So, can we leverage art to take our minds to places — real or imagined — where we can design for ourselves what that land of promise looks like?

💡 What incentives are necessary to support Nigerian and African art? Education is major. Our art schools today in Nigeria have fallen short of their initial glory when they were launched in the 1950’s and ’60s. We still have remarkable artists coming out of those institutions but many say it is much more challenging for them to fully express and fulfill their potential now. Support for artists who move beyond formal education is also key, which is why we have the Access Art X Prize for emerging artists.

💡 What African artists currently excite you and exemplify this vision? Ndidi Dike is one. She’s very socially conscious in a lot of the themes she explores in her work across a huge variety of mediums. Her work at the Venice Biennale this year was gripping and very much had its finger on the pulse in terms of representing the challenges in Nigeria, in a way that the rest of the world can understand. I think about Wura-Natasha Ogunji. She’s a great mentor of younger artists, providing a space called The Treehouse to express themselves, and teach artists to evolve beyond one medium.

💡 Is it getting easier to organize this? When I started this fair, we were at 360 naira to the dollar and we were shouting. Today, we are at 1,700 naira — we are tired, we can’t even shout again! So you can imagine what it takes to pull off this kind of endeavor in this economic climate.