For once, the story of global modernism lifts its gaze beyond Paris and New York to those who shaped it from Lagos, Zaria and Nsukka. Nigeria Modernism, now showing at Tate Modern until May 2026, feels less like an exhibition than a long-overdue act of restitution—a righting of the record that has lingered too long in the wings. It might just as well be called a revolution—albeit one waged in silk gloves and hushed confidence. This is no riotous insurgency but a velvet mutiny: a movement that drifts through museum doors, charms the canon with a conspiratorial wink, then, almost mischievously, rewrites the script of art history with effortless grace.
Unfolding through a partnership between Access Holdings Plc, Coronation Group and Tate Modern, the exhibition traces a golden arc from the 1940s to the 1970s—decades brimming with artistic ferment and post-independence fervour. Fifty artists and more than 250 works collectively dismantle the fiction of modernism as Europe’s private invention. Here, modernity dances to a different beat: it sways in aso-oke, hums in pidgin, and converses with Picasso not as pupil but as peer.
At the heart of the exhibition stand seven wooden sculptures by Ben Enwonwu, commissioned in 1960—the year Nigeria drew its first independent breath—and now part of the Access Holdings Art Collection. Their poised figures rise like sentinels of reclaimed memory: elegant, unbowed, and quietly triumphant. Returned to London not as colonial trophies but as cultural envoys, they embody history’s most graceful reversal—Nigeria, once studied, now doing the teaching.