Nigerian artist Nengi Omuku’s first solo United States exhibition, Nengi Omuku: The Gathering, brings together the artist’s work, including four monumental new paintings. Her art will be displayed alongside the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s historical African art collection, connecting a timeline of creativity across generations.
Nature and community
Omuku’s paintings take place in landscapes populated by humanity gathered in botanical fields, under trees and by rivers. Figures exist in quiet relation, promoting healing, kinship, and renewal. Omuku’s work is influenced by her mother’s horticultural work and her own experience as a florist. Honoring her West African heritage, Omuku also utilizes Sanyan, a traditional West African fabric woven by the Yoruba people of Nigeria. A historic textile once made of silk and cotton, the fabric allows Omuku to revive material tradition tied to memory, ceremony, and cultural knowledge. Used for ceremonial attire, the production of Sanyan has declined due to deforestation, overharvesting, and the rise of synthetic substitutes. Omuku revives this tradition by sourcing vintage cloth and collaborating with contemporary weavers. Sanyan, utilized as part of her canvases, returns as a living archive of resistance and cultural continuity.
The ‘Arts of Africa’ Galleries
The presence of these paintings in the de Young’s Arts of Africa galleries echoes the carved wood, cast metal, and woven fiber of the historical works in the permanent collection. Omuku’s eight paintings are shown side by side with this collection because of their thematic similarities and their spiritual and symbolic resonance. Together, the art created over time shows how imagination and resilience in African creative and communal practices have also served as responses to disruption.
The Yoruba Paka Egungun (Egungun ceremonial dance garment), 1930–1970 covered in fibers, vinyl, wood patchwork, appliqué, embroidery, looping (mask), applied glass mirrors, metal amulets, coins, and shell buttons sits as a living remnant to ceremonies and celebrations of the past. Museumgoers could easily imagine it worn by the characters in Omuku’s painting The Symphony (2023), which depicts a group of figures in an excited crowd, smiling with arms outstretched. The Yoruba Ritual pot, in early 20th-century terracotta, traditionally served as a sacred vessel for ritual healing. Playful faces, arms, and fingers emerge from the top of the vessel, twisting around the pot and connected by touch. Omuku’s Night Watch, 2021, also depicts people touching. Protective guardian figures overlap, shoulder to shoulder and side by side, as they surround a prone body lying down in the center of the picture.
‘The Gathering’
At the center of the exhibition is The Gathering, 2020. This powerful image serves as the centerpiece of the exhibition, distilling the artist’s approach to art and communication. A figure lies in the foreground, injured and in need of help. A multitude of faces, heads, and shoulders press together and surround the still figure in support. Omuku’s painting style includes an impressionistic approach to subject matter. Paint merely suggests individual faces. Images and color swirl and blend in a gesture of bodies, flowers, rivers, and fields. Nengi Omuku’s painting style succeeds in communicating a consistent message – a community of bodies merged with nature, existing like a single organism in a collective response to daily challenges.
“Omuku’s paintings are deeply political, not because they depict crisis, but because they insist on possibility,” shared Natasha Becker, Curator of African Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “In dialogue with the historical collection, her work shows how African artists have long harnessed imagination as a way to survive rupture and to dream beyond it.”
To coincide with the opening of the exhibition, FAMSF will premiere a film centering Omuku’s artistic practice and journey as an artist. The film is part of FAMSF Presents, a video series highlighting the work of artists shown at the de Young and Legion of Honor museums, including Leilah Babirye, Patrick Kelly, and Wangechi Mutu.
