I'm from Nigeria, which is a hybrid country
We used to be a British colony
And even though we're no longer a colony,
there is still evidence of the British presence
in our culture
I moved to America in 1999
And even though
I've been here since then,
home is still Nigeria
My husband is a caucasian American from Texas
And a huge fraction of my work features my husband,
because the overarching theme in the work is
this point of union between two cultures
In the piece "Wedding Portrait,"
what you're looking at is a recreation
of what happens in a Nigerian traditional wedding
The girl, based on me,
is kneeling in front of her soon-to-be husband,
giving him a cup of palm wine,
which is the moment of marriage
in an Igbo traditional wedding ceremony
Igbo is my tribe
The bride gets a cup of palm wine,
and
she has to run around
looking for the man she has picked
And when you find him, you kneel in front of him
and you offer him the palm wine
And if he accepts it, you're married
That is the moment of marriage
And that image is something that comes
in a lot in my work, because I think of it as
the contact zone in my life,
the moment where
my Nigerianness and my Americanness collided
So within the works, I have transfers of smaller images,
and there are some images that recur
in a number of my works
There are other layers of meaning
you can get out of it, depending on
if you have access to background information
or things like that
These are called portrait fabrics
And in Nigeria, we have them done for weddings,
burials, campaigns -- anything you want to do it for
So the collaged fabric on the left is
a custom portrait fabric that was made
for my mother's senatorial campaign
But I didn't get one done for my wedding
And since this is a painting
and I can invent anything I want,
I decided to imagine that I did have a portrait fabric
And there is a little joke in it
I have it as, "Nkem marries oyinbo man,"
So it's a joke for people who know the language,
because oyinbo man is a white man
And just the decision to marry him became
what would take me to America
And if the work is about
negotiating these dual ideas of home,
then he became very important in it
A lot of my art training happened at a painting academy
You paint and draw from life and casts,
from morning to night every day
So that is the tradition I came out of,
and it's a tradition that comes down
from European figurative painting
But I'm trying to take this tradition
and let something else grow out of it,
invent from it and transform it
Right as I was beginning to study art,
there was a lot of buzz about painting being dead
I know sometimes people might find it stifling
to be working in a tradition that is so rich
But I love it, because it's fertile ground
to mine from, to look at, to borrow from
How do I take this tradition and alter it,
so I can use it to talk about somewhere else
And I found that challenge exciting
