Zaria Rebels: EXPO Chicago 2026
Overview
Booth 213
Zaria Rebels revisits the legacy of the Zaria Art Society as an intellectual project that reshaped how artists from Nigeria were trained to think, research, and construct meaning. Formed in 1958, the Society’s members rejected the inheritance of colonial academic models, proposing instead a principle of natural synthesis: an insistence that artistic modernity in Nigeria must be critically grounded in local histories, materials, and epistemologies. What emerged was not a single style, but a shared methodological seriousness that privileged structure, inquiry, and cultural self-definition over aesthetic conformity.
This presentation brings together works by key members of the Zaria Art Society as well as figures associated with, or shaped by the Zaria ethos across generations. Through drawing, printmaking, relief, and painting, the exhibition foregrounds how this intellectual framework produced artists capable of sustained formal innovation while remaining anchored in context. Paper is treated not as a secondary medium but as a primary site of thinking, where experimentation, notation, and conceptual clarity are visible.
Rather than approaching Zaria as a closed historical chapter, Zaria Rebels positions it as an enduring mode of artistic reasoning whose influence continues to shape Nigerian modernism and its afterlives.
Works
