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From medieval frescoes to contemporary masterpieces, artists have long found inspiration interpreting Christian imagery. In his Renaissance mural, Leonardo da Vinci famously captured the Last Supper on the refectory wall of Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie convent. More than 400 years later, surrealist Salvador Dalí depicted the Crucifixion on a hypercube cross, a blend of science and spirituality, his wife the model for Mary Magdalene. In the hands of artists like El Greco, Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, scenes from the Gospels and portraits of Jesus rendered in myriad styles have defined Western art and religious narrative.
But one Nigerian artist, Bruce Onobrakpeya, a trailblazer of African Modernism, pushed well beyond the familiar portrayal of Christ’s story, creating a radical body of work about the Bible that now receives its due in Washington, D.C. A celebrated painter, sculptor and printmaker, Onobrakpeya reimagined the life of Jesus through Indigenous folklore to resonate with African Christians in early post-colonial Nigeria, while upending centuries of iconography.
This summer, the soon-to-be 92-year-old artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States, “The Mask and the Cross,” is on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art through January of next year. The show brings together Onobrakpeya’s work made after Nigeria became independent in 1960, including a 1969 series of linocut prints titled “Fourteen Stations of the Cross,” commissioned by the Catholic Church. The pioneering show comes to the Smithsonian following its premiere at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta last year.
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In the 1960s, a Catholic priest named Father Kevin Carroll approached Onobrakpeya, alongside fellow Nigerian artists, to interpret the Passion of the Christ for local parishioners and Christian converts, highlighted by a series of murals at St. Paul’s Church of Ebute Metta in Lagos. In addition to Onobrakpeya’s prints, “The Mask and the Cross” includes artist proofs of illustrations for a 1968 Christian textbook, May Your Kingdom Come, part of the Nigerian Catholic school curriculum for primary students, also produced at Carroll’s request.
Onobrakpeya’s reference prints for the children’s book “are extremely rare, and they are not editioned,” says Lauren Tate Baeza, who oversees the High Museum’s African art collection and curated “The Mask and the Cross” last spring. “They were simply made for this text, and the artist held on to them for over 50 years.”
The exhibition is a stark departure from sectarian aesthetics that have held sway for ages. Instead of reproducing or reappropriating the Western gaze, Onobrakpeya casts Jesus as a West African savior and sets the biblical parables in Nigerian cities, with local architecture and expressive signs of traditional life. In his work, clothing becomes a striking focal point of heritage and agency. As Jesus carries the cross on his relentless trek to Calvary, the women of Jerusalem wear adire, a native brilliantly patterned indigo-dyed fabric; Pontius Pilate appears in royal costume, as a Yoruba or Ghanaian chief in kente cloth; the Nativity shepherds are dressed as members of the Hausa people, an ethnic group in Nigeria and other parts of Africa.
“The prints are illustrations of the Bible stories and teaching of Jesus Christ from the point of view that the Christian message is universal and can be translated into different cultures, using different symbols to convey the idea of goodness and progress in this world and the world to come,” says Onobrakpeya from his home and studio-gallery in the Papa Ajao section of Lagos. “I manipulated the characters, the ideas and the philosophies to bring out the story clearly.”
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More than 50 years on, his interpretations reverberate, in part, because they are subversive of Western art. And the Afro-centric approach was not without controversy, according to the Smithsonian’s visiting curator of “The Mask and The Cross” Janine Gaëlle Dieudji.
“When you look at the prints, you have a Black Jesus. Even today, it’s controversial—and this is work that was exhibited in the Catholic Church,” she explains. “That makes Bruce Onobrakpeya an avant-gardist, but also the priest who commissioned the work.”
Of course, she adds, some found the merits of Onobrakpeya’s artistic innovation beside the point. Deemed blasphemous, the images failed to reflect the literal text of the Bible: Jesus’s story unfolds in the Herodian Kingdom of Judea in the first century C.E., and in cities such as Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
“Certain situations would be completely unknown to us in West Africa,” says Onobrakpeya, a founding member of the Zaria Art Society or the “Zaria Rebels”—a student group in 1958 at the Nigeria College of Arts, Science and Technology famous for blending modernist Western techniques and local art traditions. “For instance, in the interior of the country, you don’t have rivers. You don’t have any water.” An anchor as a biblical metaphor to represent God and faith, he continues, “is difficult for people to understand. So instead of using an anchor, I use a pin that will pin down a tent.”
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Indeed, taking visual and cultural license enabled him to communicate with young Nigerians in a way that would have been otherwise impossible. “At that time, many of these kids who were taking biblical lessons didn’t know how to read or speak English,” says Dieudji of the artist’s textbook illustrations for children. “So even without speaking the language of the church, they could relate to the stories that were narrative in this difficult book.” By the same token, Onobrakpeya describes the political realities of art commissioned by the church. “The Catholic priests preached goodness. They were agents of development and progress,” he says. “But their mission, apart from teaching, apart from health and so on, was to create a situation whereby the minds of the people were softened to the extent of accommodating all the colonial masters.”
Post-colonial Nigeria and 21st-century America are separated by vast dimensions of history. But this artwork is an invitation to find broader shared values. “The exhibition represents an important opportunity to reflect on the ways in which we are all amalgams of ideas and collisions of cultures,” says Baeza. “Onobrakpeya and I have sat together and discussed the notion that there is no such thing as purity. The works selected for this exhibition truly demonstrate cultural and religious multiple belonging.”