Olu Oguibe

Olu Oguibe is a Nigerian born art historian, artist, critic, and assistant professor in the History of Architecture and Art Department of the University of Illinois in Chicago, and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Oguibe graduated with honor from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka and received his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he studied as a British Foreign and Commonwealth Office Scholar. A poet and practicing artist, Oguibe has received numerous other awards, including the New Collaborations Grant of the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Indira Ghandi Memorial Award, and the 1992 All-Africa Christopher Okigbo Prize for Literature as well as honorable mention in the 1993 Noma Awards for publishing in Africa. Oguibe has exhibited his work in numerous major art shows, including personal shows in England, Germany, Australia, and Africa. Regarded as a leading post-modernist artist, he has shown his work in Interzones, an international exhibit at the Kunstverein, Copenhagen, and in Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. He has also done residencies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, the ArchivGallerie, Friedberg, and in Sydney, Australia. He will be part of a resident collaboration of international artists in Rostock, Germany, in the Summer of 1996.

Oguibe has published widely in scholarly and literary journals, including Third Text, Atlantica, Callaloo and several others. He has also contributed essays to the Macmillan Dictionary of Art, the Larousse Encyclopedia, and such critical volumes as Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (ed. Jean Fisher, Kala Press London, 1994) and Art History and its Methods: A Critical Anthology (ed. Eric Fernie, Phaidon, London, forthcoming). Oguibe is the editor of Sojourners: An Anthology of New Writing by Africans in Britain (Africa Refugee Publishing Collective, London, 1994) and author of several volumes of poetry. He is on the advisory board of Third Text and is arts and culture editor of Africa World Review in London. He is also author of two monographs on African artists forthcoming from Kala Press, London, and Galerie Amrad Publications, Montreal.