ARTS EMOWAA Pavilion For Arts in City of Arts

MICHAEL JIMOH

Paris has the Louvre, New York MOMA. The London Museum is smack in the centre of England. There are as many museums in Florence and Venice as there are gondolas plying its waterways. Art aficionados and tourists flock to these institutions from time to time to admire a Picasso portrait, for instance, a Pollock drip work, a Michelangelo sculptural piece, a Constable landscape or a Van Gogh oil on canvas of miners feasting on potatoes at dusk.

Scholars and students of art, archeologists, researchers and restorers follow in their wake, stopping over for research purposes to better understand an art work, preserve a rare one or restore a precious masterpiece fast losing pigment and brush strokes by the original painter. With a rich heritage from as long as anyone can remember, those cities have become bona fide culture capitals in their own way basically because they have the institutions that serve more than what you expect from an average museum.

Having a replica of those great institutions in Nigeria has been festering for years in the mind of Phillp Iheanacho. His background is neither museums nor arts and culture. But the idea of having an all-encompassing art institution had taken root for some time, germinating gradually into what may become one of the most relevant such institutions in the culture sector in Nigeria.

The Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) is something never dreamed of before. Yes, there are fifty or so museums across Nigerian towns and cities, most of them headquartered in state capitals or places designated heritage sites. Many of them are near decrepit state, overseen by untrained civil servants and bureaucrats who know next to nothing about the technicalities involved in preserving one. Visitors are few and far between, drawing a mere few thousands in a year - far, far less than visitors to the Louvre in one summery month.

All that will change soon by the time EMOWAA opens its doors to the public from the second quarter of 2024. And, as its name suggests, it certainly will not be a repository of works from Benin alone. There will be art works from the West African sub-region - Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Togo on display.

Sow a thought, so the saying goes, and you reap a word. Sow a word and you reap an action. For Iheanacho the action now stands firmly near a similar edifice right in the heart of Benin City capital of Edo state. Called the Pavilion, EMOWAA is a glancing distance from the National Commission of Museum and Monuments at Ring Road in Benin. From the moment of conception to now as a reality on the ground, Iheanacho knew what he’d always wanted: an all-round art institution that will not only stage exhibitions but be home to in-house restorers of art works, venue for seminars and symposia, a residence for writers, filmmakers, artists, in short, a place where the creative types can blossom. The choice of the ancient city is not for nothing. The city of Ogisos has a well-fostered reputation for arts and culture dating back to the 15th century. So, there couldn’t have been a better choice for the non-for-profit body to site the Pavilion. For Iheanacho, the idea of setting up in Africa similar institutions in Europe has come – and for good reasons.

“One of the things that has always frustrated me

Edo Museum of West African Art is about supporting creative and heritage management involved in the cultural and creative sector ... EMOWAA is partly a museum project but it is much larger than that. It is about creating infrastructure that supports the sector generally, that creates opportunities for creative types in the cultural sector and it is about creating the necessary infrastructure that all museums and cultural institutions across West Africa can rely on about our country is that we are a country with great culture, with great creativity but with very limited infrastructure to support creativity,” Iheanacho told journalists last week at Radisson Hotel GRA Ikeja, Lagos.

“Edo Museum of West African Art is about supporting creative and heritage management involved in the cultural and creative sector,” Iheanacho went on. “EMOWAA is partly a museum project but it is much larger than that. It is about creating infrastructure that supports the sector generally, that creates opportunities for creative types in the cultural sector and it is about creating the necessary infrastructure that all museums and cultural institutions across West Africa can rely on.”

So, in theory and practice, EMOWAA will be different from other existing museums in Nigeria today in that it will be “a living institution relevant and connected to the contemporary. It will expand public space and bridge traditional divides of heritage and living artists and artisans, demonstrating a strong continuum between past, present and future.”

Though Iheanacho did say the project isn’t so much