Earth, indigo, and the òrìṣà
No works match that combination.
Room I · Ayé
The city
The public world: markets and queues, conferences and congregations, gardens and cracking walls. Nigeria's streets first — the world as it gathers. Every crossing begins here.
Room II · Ayé
The people
The persons of this world: sisis and omidans, mothers and boys, a smoker, a face in the mirror — and the animal persons of the folktales, tortoise, lizard and chameleon, who are people too.
Room III
The crossing
What opens the door between worlds: bàtà and bell, mask and masquerade — and Elesin Ọba, the King's Horseman, whose duty is to cross. Abikú, the child who keeps crossing back.
Room IV
Ọ̀run — the òrìṣà and the ancestors
Ṣàngó and Oya, Ọ̀ṣun, Yemọja and Olókùn, Orí — and the gathered ancestors. Many are painted in soil itself: sacred ground for sacred subjects.
The exit
Gate for Ọ̀ṣun
You leave through his gate — welded steel for the river goddess, made with Monica Thomeczek. Knoxville, 1996.
Selected exhibitions
Four decades of showing: the Ona exhibitions and the National Museum in Lagos first, then Knoxville, Madison and New York — and the Mami Wata tour, from UCLA's Fowler Museum to the Smithsonian. A selection; his CV holds the full record.
Solo exhibitions
- 2007Yoruba Masking Traditions Photographs · Ewing Multicultural Center, RISD
- 1996Like a Play in the Sand Department of Art, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
- 1989Out of the Mould University Hall, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀ Drawings and paintings, published as the second in Ona's solo exhibition series.
Selected group exhibitions
- 2012Return of Ona Nike Art Gallery & Watersworth Gallery, Lagos
- 2008Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits Fowler Museum, UCLA · National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian · Chazen Museum · Cantor Arts Center, Stanford
- 2005Ife Art School in Retrospect Travelling exhibition, Onabolu Art Centre, Lagos
- 2003RISD Faculty Biennial RISD Museum of Art, Providence
- 1999Perpetual Motions Skoto Gallery, New York
- 1995Best of Ife Signature Art Gallery, Lagos
- 1990Ona‑2: Radiance of Rhythms National Museum, Lagos
- 1989Ona‑1 Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan
- 1989Silver Jubilee Exhibition Society of Nigerian Artists, National Theatre, Lagos
- 1986Butterfly Creations National Museum, Lagos
Curated & convened
- 2016Whirling Return of the Ancestors: Egúngún Masquerade Ensembles of the Yorubas Co-curator · RISD Museum The exhibition he built rather than hung in — and the one the Critical Encounters panel was recorded inside.
- 1994Seminar in Honour of Father Kevin Carroll Convener · Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀
- 1992International Conference on the Diversity of Creativity in Nigeria Convener · Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀
Commissions & public works
- 1996Gate for Ọ̀ṣun Commissioned metal gate, with Monica Thomeczek · Knoxville, Tennessee The work that closes the gallery — you leave through it.
- 1984Weavers Public mural · Department of Architecture, Obafemi Awolowo University
- 1983–88Royal and civic portraits Onílala of Lanlate · Oba J. O. Akinpelu, Olola of Ola-Ejigbo · Chief Felix Ibru
In his own words
Five institutions, sixteen years, one subject deepening. Start with two minutes at the AGO; end among the live drummers at City College.
- 2026
Navigating the Mysterious and the Exotic Lecture · Brown University · 52 min On the politics of presenting African art in the West, told through one work — A Verry Drunk Hunters Dream — and the exhibition of the same name at Brown's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Watch ↗
- 2022
Yoruba Egungun Masquerade Performances for the Ancestors Lecture · Art Institute of Chicago · 1 hr How music, poetry and choreography are inseparable from the mask itself — egungun as a multisensory art. Delivered alongside the exhibition The Language of Beauty in African Art. Watch ↗
- 2017
Celebrating the Ancestors: Egungun in the Afro-Atlantic World Symposium · City College of New York · 2 hr 19 min With Henry J. Drewal and Chief Alaagba Akinsegun of Oyotunji Village — and live singing, drumming and masquerade by the village's Egungun Society. Watch ↗
- 2016
Critical Encounters: Egúngún Masquerade Ensembles Panel · RISD Museum · 2 hr 7 min Five voices around the museum's egúngún ensembles — curators, scholars and a practitioner, including Henry J. Drewal — recorded during the exhibition he co-curated. Watch ↗
- 2010
Bolaji Campbell on Egungun Short film · Art Gallery of Ontario · 2 min Two minutes on the egungun masquerade: the ancestors made present in cloth, colour and motion. AGO ↗ · YouTube ↗
About the artist
Bolaji Campbell is Professor of African and African Diaspora Art in the Department of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. He paints, and he writes about painting — one project, seen from both sides.
He trained at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, taking both a BA and an MFA in fine arts there, and took his PhD in art history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The earliest works here come out of those Ifẹ̀ years — including a 1988 painting of the university's own biological garden.
His paintings draw on Yoruba cosmology and the visual language of adire textiles: the indigo grids and resist-dyed motifs that sit behind so many of the figures. Alongside oil and acrylic he has worked for decades in soil on burlap, laying earth directly into woven jute — seventeen works in this archive use it. The archive itself is a selection: the pieces he has chosen to share, from a studio practice that runs far longer.
He is a founding member of Ona, the Ifẹ̀ group whose onaism drew modern Nigerian painting back toward Yoruba design principles — from Ona‑1 at Ibadan in 1989 and Radiance of Rhythms at the National Museum in Lagos the year after, to Return of Ona in Lagos in 2012.
Beneath all of it is teaching: four decades of students, from Ifẹ̀ and Pankshin to Knoxville, Madison, Charleston and Providence — where he also headed RISD's department of art history from 2014 to 2017.
And the work of the field itself: convening conferences at Ifẹ̀, editing Kurio Africana, moderating at Yale and the Gibbes, and carrying the argument to the Smithsonian, Harvard, the Brooklyn Museum and the World Congress of Òrìṣà Tradition in Rio de Janeiro.
Fellowships
- Sylvia and Pamela Coleman Fellowship Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Richard A. Horovitz Fund Fellowship Institute of International Education
- Postdoctoral Fellowship Avery Research Center
Writing
Three books and thirty years of essays — the scholarship that runs beside the painting. A selection; the full record lives in his CV.
- Fabric of Immortality Africa World Press, 2020 How egungun masking keeps the living and the departed in conversation — read through Yoruba thought rather than Western categories, and followed from Nigeria to Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and the United States. Publisher ↗ · Amazon ↗
- Painting for the Gods Africa World Press, 2008 The shrine murals painted for the òrìṣà, largely by women — an ephemeral art, renewed season after season, in which colour is not decoration but an active force. A tradition he grew up inside before he studied it. Publisher ↗ · Amazon ↗
- Yorùbá: Avant Garde Artists of the Modern Era Africa World Press, 2026 On the àre — the trailblazers and innovators of Yoruba tradition — and the modern artists who carried that role through colonial and postcolonial currents. His newest book, published in February 2026. Publisher ↗ · Amazon ↗
Selected essays
- “If a Woman Knows Cult Secret, She Must Never Tell” African Arts · 2022 Egungun is usually told as a masculine preserve. This paper follows the women instead — the ritual consecrations they perform, the secrets they are sworn to keep — and argues that female power sits at the heart of masquerade. African Arts ↗
- Yoruba Metal Arts Peace, Power and Prestige · U. Press of Florida · 2020 His chapter for the Harn Museum's survey of African metal arts, on the place of iron and brass in Yoruba life. He knows the material from the inside — his own gate for Ọ̀ṣun closes this site's gallery. Harn Museum ↗
- Illustration in the African Context History of Illustration · Bloomsbury · 2018 The African chapter of Bloomsbury's first comprehensive history of illustration — an argument for African image-making inside the discipline's main story, written for the field's standard textbook. Book ↗
- Of Color, Character, Attributes and Values of Orunmila Ifa Divination · Indiana University Press · 2016 For Indiana's landmark Ifá volume: the colours, character and values of Ọ̀rúnmìlà, òrìṣà of wisdom and divination — the essay closest to his life-long argument that among the Yoruba, colour is never mere decoration. Indiana UP ↗
- Eegun Ogun: War Masquerades in Ibadan African Arts · 2015 From fieldwork at Ibadan's egungun festival: the war masquerades — armed, volatile, licensed to menace — and what a modernising city does to that license. African Arts ↗
- Coloring the Orisa Surfaces · Indiana University Press · 2009 Why an òrìṣà figure is painted, powdered and renewed: colour and ritual substance on African sculpture — surface as devotion, not decoration.
- Diversity of Creativity in Nigeria (editor) Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀ · 1993 The 408-page survey he co-edited at Ifẹ̀ — introduction, an essay on Oshinowo's drummers, and a generation of Nigerian artists recorded in one volume.
Scholarship on his work
His painting and the Ona movement have themselves become subjects of study — including two doctoral theses on Onaism.
- Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art Cambridge University Press · 2014
- Janine Sytsma, “Departures: A Critical Study of the Ona Group and the Spread of Onaism” PhD dissertation · University of Wisconsin–Madison · 2014
- David Olajide Makinde, “Modernisation of Creative Heritage: Ona in Modern Nigerian Art” PhD thesis · University of Nigeria, Nsukka · 2014
- Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, on motherhood in Yoruba art and aesthetics Ohio University Press · 2012 · and Palgrave Macmillan · 2011
- Jonathan Bishop Highfield, Food and Foodways in African Narratives Routledge · 2017
- Reviews of Painting for the Gods African Studies Review · Journal of the African Literature Association · 2009