Dele Jegede

Early life and education

Dele Jegede was born in 1945 in Ikere-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria and earned his first degree in Fine Arts from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, in 1973. From 1979 to 1983, he studied art history under Roy Sieber at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, where he received his MA and PhD degrees. His doctoral dissertation, Trends in Contemporary Nigerian Art (Indiana University, 1983), was the first ever to focus solely on contemporary Nigerian art.

Career

Jegede began his professional career in Nigeria as a cartoonist and painter. A contemporary of Josy Ajiboye, another cartoonist who focused mainly on social genre, Jegede used his cartoons to comment on the excesses of the privileged and draw attention to social and political issues in general. Aderonke Adesanya, art historian and scholar of contemporary art of Africa, considers Jegede's cartoons as "copious sketches of the skeleton of nation...." From 1974 to 1977, he was art editor at the Daily Times of Nigeria, Nigeria's most influential daily. Jegede continued to publish weekly cartoons in the Sunday Times, a sister publication of the Daily Times well into the late 1970s when he left for graduate studies at Indiana University. A short while after his return to Nigeria in 1983, he resumed his weekly comic strip, Kole Omole, which featured a precocious 5-year-old boy, through whom Jegede took subtle jabs at the military regime. In 1977, he joined the faculty of the Center for Cultural Studies of the University of Lagos and organized cultural activities in conjunction with the Second World and Black Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77). Among his colleagues at the Center for Cultural Studies of the University of Lagos were Bode Osanyin, a strong follower of Bertolt Brecht and advocate of total theater. There were also Joy Nwosu [1], Akin Euba, and Lazarus Ekwueme, foremost Nigerians in the field of music. He began his career at the University of Lagos as a Junior Research Fellow in 1977 and left in 1992 as Director of the Center for Cultural Studies. He was active not only as a scholar, but also as a painter, with a style that deviated from the dominant social genre. He introduced satire into his paintings and focused on themes of social and political import, as in his 1991 exhibition on Lagos, the cultural and financial capital of Nigeria. In 1989, he was elected as president of the Society of Nigerian Artists (SNA), succeeding Solomon Wangboje, who was the first Nigerian to hold the doctorate degree in art education. During Jegede's three years as president, Jegede secured a legal charter for the SNA, democratized the structure by creating state chapters, curated a major exhibition, "Images of the Nigerian Nation," with an accompanying catalog of the same title, and led the campaign for the establishment of the National Gallery of Art. In 1993, Jegede accepted a job offer from Indiana State University, Terre Haute and relocated there with his family. He has developed and taught courses in studio art and art history.

Jegede is widely acknowledged as one of a corps of African scholars who have continued to shape the direction of the field through their innovative scholarly research and curatorial pursuits. His strong critique of Jean Pigozzi's collection, which is described as the world's largest collection of contemporary African art [2] has drawn a sharp criticism from Thomas McEvilley, who believes that Jegede's criticism lacks credibility because he has spent too much time away from Africa. In turn, Elizabeth Harney contends that McEvilley's position is an essentialist view of who should speak for whom

Public collections

Jegede's art is on display in various public and private collections in Nigeria and the U.S.

Publications

Jegede's publications include Contemporary African Art: Five Artists, Diverse Trends (2000); Women to Women: Weaving Cultures, Shaping History (2000), and Encyclopedia of African American Artists: Artists of the American Mosaic (2009)