Primitives or Classicists? A Critical Look at the Work of Uli Women Painters of Nri.

Uli is the body and wall painting tradition of the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria. It was popular and common across Igbo villages until recently. The decline of uli like many other such cultural resources results from nescience and devaluation of autochthonous cultural expressions that do not measure up to prescribed Western ideas of art in the postcolonial experience. As part of efforts to save uli from possible extinction, artists of Nsukka School have researched the uli creative idiom and also appropriated it in their work. However, this appropriation, while trying to prolong the tradition, has also subtly added to the shadow of primitivism cast on the work of uli classical women painters in scholarship as the two paradigms have existed along the lines of the traditional–contemporary binary championed by Western scholars of African art in the early 1990s and beyond. This paper studies the uli revivalist painting sessions organized by Obiora Udechukwu and Krydz Ikwuemesi in 2003 and 2004 and uses the process and outcome of the paintings to argue that the women are not primitives, but classicists, if classicism is to be seen as a multi-versal experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]