Ndidi dike biography for kids

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After spending her early years in London, Ndidi Dike relocated to Nigeria. There she completed her degree in Fine Arts at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka in 1984, studying under some of the country’s leading modern artists including Uche Okeke (1933-2016) and Obiora Udechukwu (born in 1946). Although she studied painting, it was her transgressive work as a self-taught sculptor – a domain then conventionally reserved for male artists – that won her early acclaim. Much of N. Dike’s early work took the form of intricate wood relief assemblages characterised by curvilinear lines and symbols carved with industrial power tools and embellished with burning techniques. Works like Ikenga (1993), included in the seminal 1995 exhibition Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, drew on influences including Igbo spiritual practices and design traditions such as uli. Through her imaginative embrace of quotidian though historically laden materials such as banana fibres, branding irons, brass figurines, coins and cowrie shells, N. Dike’s formative work modelled an interest in mixed-media aesthetics and histories of cultural exchange, two themes that would animate her dynamic practice for more than three decades.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, N. Dike exhibited consistently throughout Nigeria and internationally, developing an enviable following among art historians, curators and collectors. A breakthrough in her career came with Waka-into-Bondage: The Last ¾ Mile, a 2008 solo exhibition at the then newly established Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos. Curated by the centre’s pioneering director Bisi Silva, for the exhibition N. Dike employed a range of representational strategies to address the complex histories and enduring effects of transatlantic slavery. The show included a suite of wall-mounted sculptures fashioned out of appropriated harbour wood and affixed with slave shackles and other artefacts t

  • Ndidi Dike was born in 1960

    • Shaping African Modernism: The Presence and Absence of Women Artists

    by Ann Glasscock, Associate Curator

    The Taft Museum of Art is pleased to present African Modernism in America, an exhibition organized by Fisk University Galleries and the American Federation of Arts. One of the highlights in the show is a photocollage by contemporary artist Ndidi Dike (right). This powerful work investigates the women who explored modernism in Africa and shaped its narratives.


    Though Dike’s panorama unfolds across three chapters, or panels, some figures, names, and narratives recur (below). One such figure is Ladi Kwali, the influential Nigerian ceramic artist whose portrait graces the 20 naira bank note on which Dike builds her collage. The first panel focuses on the role of women in establishing the discourse around artmaking in Nigeria.

    Ndidi Dike Designing The Politics of Selection at Fisk University, January 2022. Photograph by Perrin Lathrop

    Ndidi Dike (born United Kingdom; lives and works in Nigeria), The Politics of Selection, 2022, photocollage printed on transparency, earthenware vessel, earth, book, paper. Courtesy of the artist

    The second centers Fisk University—a historically Black university and the oldest institution of higher learning in Nashville, Tennessee—as a site of Black diasporic exchange. The final panel draws connections between struggles faced by Black women artists in Africa and the United States. By repeating their names, works, and faces, Dike rebalances women artists’ frequent overshadowing by their male colleagues and questions the complex and contested histories of white patronage of Black artists, exposing the forms of these women’s silencing and their strategies of visibility.

    African Modernism in America features the work of
    several of the women artists in Dike’s photocollage,
    including Suzanna Ogunjami and Ladi Kwali.

    As a master ceramicist at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre in Nigeria, Kwali modernized the traditi

      Ndidi dike biography for kids

    Ndidi Dike MRSS

    Ndidi Dike, born in London, she returned to Nigeria to train as a painter and graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, graduating with a BA degree in mixed media painting . Although known internationally as a sculptor, having taught herself to sculpt, with decades of transgressive sculptural practice

    In the current climate of contemporary politics, protectionism, nationalism and globalization Dike primarily works as a multi- media artist with a special interest in personal archives and long term researched based projects and engagement with global histories to address the pre and post-colonial historic and social-economic legacy of the enslaved, forced migration, and memory among other issues. That relates too and ties in with "Atlantic World Relations" which looks at the circulation of bodies, ideas, performances, and cultures within the context of the Atlantic world (the countries and continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean

    Her use of materiality, metaphors and objects aesthetically carry the tangible weight and implicitness of wider references and symbolisms to their former economic, social and political lives. Become active participants in immersive installations responding to the space in which the work is being exhibited and theme at hand by, weaving materials and meanings through both conventional and experimental processes.

    And simultaneously engaging with geo-political policies that underwrite the control and extractive industrial complex that govern natural resource and appropriation in Africa, That investigate the global entanglements of material (dis) possession, postcolonial exploitation in the Global South, focusing on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar. As well as displacement , living patriarchy, gender equity, the political dimensions of market aesthetics , consumption and commodity cultures ,space, borders and territory among other exigencies

    For years her art has sought to address and refract the

  • Biography. Ndidi Dike, born in

    • Ndidi Dike

    Nigerian artist

    Ndidi Dikepronunciation was born in 1960 in London. She is a Nigeria-based visual artist working in sculpture and mixed-media painting. She is one of Nigeria's leading female artists, working in an artistic world typically designed for men. She is from Amaokwe Item in Bende local government of Abia State. She has three living sisters

    Biography

    Ndidi Dike first became interested in art as a very young child taking art classes in primary school. She completed her secondary education in England, and further explored her creativity in interdisciplinary art classes. "I loved the sense of freedom of interpretation, of exploring different media and I always felt a sense of peace during creative processes and so existed in a world of my own."

    She graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), located in Enugu State, southeastern region of Nigeria with a Diploma in Music Education (voice), followed by a B.A in Fine and Applied Arts in 1984 where she majored in mixed media painting. She studied under other well known artists, like Uche Okeke and Obiora Udechukwu. After her mandatory year in the National Youth Service, Dike made the choice of becoming a professional studio artist in her home of Owerri, the capital city Imo State, southeast Nigeria. The artwork she created while in service was the majority of work she put in her first solo exhibition, titled "Mixed Media Expose, 1986."

    Dike is a member of the Guild of Fine Arts, Nigeria (GFAN), the Society of Nigerian Artists (SNA), and the Royal Society of Sculptors, London.

    Background

    Ndidi Dike uses her artistic ability to address and approach serious topics like slavery and colonialism, and the historical and continued impact of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. She makes use of mixed-media and months of research to create her pieces.This effort has also been extended into closely related