Vividly painted in acrylics, "Afternoon With Lorenzo" measures 11 feet wide.
Taking time out to talk with a visitor at his DC studio, Victor Ekpuk, born and educated in Nigeria, is asked about possible Western influences on his art. Might there be an exchange similar, say, to the influence of African masks on Picasso’s painting? Chuckling good-naturedly, Ekpuk replies, “My thing is—if I’m standing by the banks of the river, why borrow a cup of water from somebody else up the hill?”
For more than 35 years, the artist’s buoyant ingenuity has drawn from that African wellspring. Specifically, his work derives from Nsibidi, an ancient communication system still practiced in Nigeria among the elite Ekpe society. As a written language, signs and symbols are used to represent ideas; its marks appear on textiles and are painted on masks and bodies.
Ekpuk was encouraged to look into historical art forms while studying fine and applied art at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. “As an artist, I began to see how those symbols could inform my interest in abstraction,” he explains. “That it’s part of my patrimony was fascinating to me. I grew up within that culture. That aesthetic inspires my approach.”
Ekpuk’s upbeat graphic style mirrors his own genial spirit, as he reimagines the traditional knowledge system for today’s world. His commentary on contemporary issues isn’t new. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1988, he became a political cartoonist and illustrator for The Daily Times, a major Nigerian newspaper. “What is the essence of a story? I had to understand that and reduce its ideas to a basic expression,” he recalls. Distilling ideas continues to fuel his work, which encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, public art, printmaking and even book-cover illustrations for reissues of works by the acclaimed Nigerian author Chinua Achebe.
At times, Ekpuk’s drawings have expanded into supersized wall murals that he hand-draws, mainly with chalk or acrylic marker. One called Harlem Sunrise takes lines on a merry chase. Commissioned in 2018 by The Africa Center in Harlem, the mural is a force-field tribute to New York. Among its landscape of life forms, what might be an upside-down bird flows into the eyebrow of a one-eyed face, while a pretzel and taxi cabs, picked out in yellow, coast along below mountainous skyscrapers.
In the center, a polka-dot rooster arises with the sun. While he thinks about the overall design and composition of these works in advance, Ekpuk says that “once I get in there, I don’t control it anymore. It becomes automatic, stream of consciousness. I just have to draw.”
Mega-works are among the artist’s favorite projects, allowing freedom to express his thoughts without space limitations. And since they are based on sacred art forms, he adds, “For me, immersive pieces create a feeling of being at one with the work, in some kind of spiritual space.”
A similar environment greets visitors to The Phillips Collection, where an installation by Ekpuk wraps the main entry in jubilant energy. The artist explains its title: State of the Union: Things have fallen apart, can the center still hold? “When you come in it’s joyful, it’s beautiful. But when you look closely, you begin to see the dark side of that and some other things that have been going on,” he says, referring to an emblematic U.S. Capitol building interwoven with a clenched fist and a BLM banner. “There’s no perfect society in the world,” he observes. “The work also acknowledges that it’s still a beautiful country and has potential to be more. It is something that has to be won every day.”
The universality of Ekpuk’s art has taken him around the nation and the world. He recently visited Riyadh to discuss a future project with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture. In June, he headed to Houston’s Rice University, where three of his 80-foot-high, digitally printed banners were exhibited along with his smaller sculptures. Ekpuk’s work has been displayed at Somerset House in London and at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. And it is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, where a six-foot collage painting from his ongoing series “Slave Narratives” now hangs.
In the artist’s DC drawing-and-painting studio adorned with objects from his African art collection, he points out a miniature mockup for a new sculpture that won a competition sponsored by Logan Circle Community Association. The bright-red, 10-foot-tall work in painted steel will be displayed on 14th and R Streets, NW. Its flat panels represent an abstract female figure wearing antebellum dress from one angle. From another view, she is dancing—a reference to the neighborhood’s past and current vibrancy.
Given Ekpuk’s long horizon, it seems appropriate that his studio is located in the historic Eckington School, built in 1897. He started painting and drawing there soon after arriving in Washington 22 years ago from Lagos, Nigeria, where he met his future wife, an American whose job brought them to the DC area. They now live in Alexandria, where the artist pursues his computer-generated projects, including his latest sculpture as well as The Phillips Collection’s 2021 installation.
In developing his style of written expression, Ekpuk researches time-honored symbols and aspects of the African diaspora. Still, he doesn’t intend for the viewer to literally translate every cipher. As the artist eloquently states in the museum’s wall text: “Through my ‘script’ drawings, the distinction between writing and visual art, legibility and illegibility are dissolved, allowing the abstraction rooted in ancestral knowledge and indigenous power symbols to build intuitive meaning.”
Ekpuk’s work will be on view at Princeton University Art Museum through October 8. His art is represented in Washington by Morton Fine Art: mortonfineart.com. For more information, visit victorekpuk.com.