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CHAPTER 4 Heritage as Style Travel, Interaction, and the Branding of Osogbo Art Does heritage have a style? Judging from the works for sale in Osogbo’s galleries today the answer is yes. The prevailing styles seem to be comprised of allusions to the rhythmic lyricism of Twins Seven-Seven, the bold colors of Rufus Ogundele, and the masked heads of Jimoh Buraimoh, all three representing the first generation of Osogbo artists . Nor has the subject matter of contemporary Osogbo art changed: depictions of various locally important aspects of traditional Yoruba religion and history continue to dominate. References to the world outside the Yoruba cosmos hardly exist. In other words, the reinvention of Osogbo as a center of Yoruba art and heritage also has affected the form of the arts themselves. For Jimoh Buraimoh, the leading figure in Osogbo’s art scene today, maintaining the conventions is not only a matter of identity but also a question of style—a style for which Osogbo artists are known and which guarantees their market share. Thus, one of the plans he pursues in conjunction with the Osogbo Heritage Council and Infogem, the Lagos-based firm marketing the Osun festival, is an artist village. Situated next to the Osun grove, the village will demonstrate Osogbo’s international fame as a city of arts and heritage. To that end, studios will be built, each housing one or two artists working in Osogbo today with whom tourists can interact. Work will not be limited to modern art but will include traditional artistic activities like dyeing, pottery, carving, or blacksmithing. As of this writing, the project is still in its planning phase. Yet Buraimoh, who also functions as vice chairman of the artist village planning committee, is eager to realize it. As he stated in an interview in 2006: “The importance of Osogbo is very well known because we have our own style, peculiar style, that we usually follow . . . We started it, before us they don’t have style, but after us that changed. Ahmadu Bello has its own style, Yaba has its own style, Enugu has its own style. We continue to promote the message and modify it from time to time.”1 Following Buraimoh’s insistence 78 OSOGBO AND THE ART OF HERITAGE on style, this chapter illuminates the ways in which Osogbo artists are using the artistic fame of the city to enhance and consolidate their market reach. As I shall argue, in the past thirty years Osogbo artists have actively transformed and redefined the element of creativity and newness which characterized the early merchandising of the Osogbo project, turning Osogbo’s “new images” into expressions of heritage, and thus providing heritage with a recognizable and distinct visuality or “style.” I want to substantiate this argument from three different angles. In the first part I will look into the strategies of display since the act of exhibiting was an integral part of the “Osogbo experiment.” In the second part I will explore how the institutions and practices which emerged from this need for documentation were taken over by Osogbo artists themselves. The export of the “new images” which started in the 1960s not only generated new artscapes that linked Europe, Africa and North America but also allowed their creators to travel widely within these scapes. Faced with a decline of interest in their work, Osogbo artists shifted the mode of interpretation to focus on the new interest of heritage. In the third part, I will look into the effects of this new framing for the visual depiction of Osogbo’s guardian deity Osun in the public sphere. Exporting the New In 1964, Ulli Beier and the English filmmaker Frank Speed shot a film about the manifold artistic activities taking place in Osogbo at that time. Under the title “New Images for a Changing African Society,” the film showed the wide spectrum of what had become known as “Osogbo art,” ranging from Asiru Olatunde’s aluminum panels and Adebisi Akanji’s cement screens to the theater performances of Duro Ladipo and the art works of the troupe’s actors who had attended the summer schools organized by Ulli Beier. In the context of Beier’s public declaration of these artistic activities as an “experiment,” the film’s agenda is clearly to present the (successful) results of this experiment. Beyond the medium of film, Osogbo art was on display in articles, books, and letters. The most important medium, however, was exhibitions . Apart from the Mbari...

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