“African artists have been creating wonderful pieces. They’ve been creating works that embody the African story. I’m not just talking about artists who are working traditionally. I’m also talking about artists who are working digitally.”
— Osinachi
Viewing the work of Prince Jacon Osinachi Igwe, known simply as Osinachi to the art world, on a computer screen, you would be forgiven for wondering what’s so web3 about it, with the work’s apparent stylistic debt to true art world titans like Alex Katz, David Hockney, and Amy Sherald. Personally, much of the African artist’s output strikes me as a shoe-in for a gallery show with its unique infusion of personality and narrative into a recognizable tradition.
That is, until you tell me that the pieces are neither painted nor Photoshopped, but created in Microsoft Word. You mean you can make art in Word?
Not just art, but great art.
Before coming to web3 in 2017, Osinachi had tried reaching out to galleries, but, as he tells it, “I made it clear in those emails that the work I make is digital, and they were created with Microsoft Word. You can imagine what the response would be. Nobody wanted to take a chance on digital art.”
The work speaks to both race and culture, breaking through the marginalization of natively African artists; Osinachi accomplishes this not through a confrontational or heavily conceptual approach but through the same mode of indirect attack employed by Amy Sherald.
Like Sherald, Osinachi doesn’t draw his dark-skinned subjects in shades of brown but in grayscale. The two also make great use of text, Sherald in wordy aphoristic titles and Osinachi in explanatory text attached to his works’ metadata. And like Sherald, he recreates the world around him and its people in a direct, honest series of colorful vignettes.
Showing & Telling
The term “vignettes” is operative. Before committing to a visual arts practice, Osinachi was on a writerly path. Growing up in Aba, Nigeria, he was a voracious reader. “I would go out and buy books, secondhand books from a particular shop in a particular market because people don’t read so much in Aba, the city where I grew up. So these books were easy to buy and cheap.”
He started writing short stories to send off to literary magazines but, as he recounts it, “I would go into Word to type my stories, but sometimes I’d get bored, and I’d play with Microsoft Word,” and thus he’d explore the program’s little known design capabilities. The images he ended up creating were literal stand-ins for the stories he was putting off writing.
“Looking back now,” Osinachi told me in our 2022 interview, “I think I was trying to recreate what I was seeing in those books, where you have texts, and then there’s a visual illustration of what is going on, the text and then the visual illustration. That is what I tried to create. And that led me to start creating visual things.”
Many artists don’t add much of interest to the description fields of their metadata, but Osinachi’s are indispensable, especially for a non-Nigerian audience. For example, the first piece featured in this essay, Nwanyi-Sunday, is accompanied by the following:
“Nwanyi-Sunday” used to be a common name in Igboland. The name represents feminine beauty at its finest — a beauty that recognizes the femininity of the woman (nwanyi) and, at the same time, compliments it with the brightness and laidback feeling that is often associated with a Sunday.
Now, imagine Nwanyi-Sunday in her Sunday best, wearing the beautiful hair she made just yesterday.
Go back and look at the piece after having read that. The text is not indispensable, but it opens a work up.
The visual art did more than supplant a short story; it surpassed his earlier ambitions by miles:
“I found out that creating art was a bit more urgent to pass the message across for me. I just had to create these visual elements and bring them together in one piece. And it’s not even a short story. It is a whole novel. There are so much so many interpretations. There’s so much to see.
“And there’s a part of me in these stories. As an African child, I couldn’t connect to stories with tea parties and things like that. Creating visual pieces, I can embody my own story. I feel that that is what visual art has done for me.”
That interview was held on the eve of the release of his piece Laundry Day and the announcement of the African Arts incubator AFRICA HERE that he hosted on MakersPlace, projects that embody Osinachi’s vision of art as an operating system for telling the world’s stories.
Osinachi’s Laundry Day
Laundry Day is about renewal, “from making resolutions to improve specific parts of ourselves, to the concept of ‘turning a new leaf’” (as his artist statement would have it), but it is also a fantasy. The laundromat as “a public place of purification” (ibid) is not available to Nigerians.
When asked about the piece, Osinachi mentioned daydreaming about laundromats, but “I’ve never been in one, honestly. I started using a washing machine for my laundry maybe three or four years back. Before that, I would just wash with my hands.”
“I’ve seen Nigerians who live overseas say they are going for laundry… It’s a place where you can sort of form a connection with other people while you are trying to renew, as these are places of renewal: you take dirty clothes, and you make them clean again. But while you’re waiting for the clothes, you’re making connections with people.”
(Osinachi’s vision of a laundromat must also be one without phones and tablets, which is also a worthwhile daydream.)
The piece is not a story about Africans abroad. It is a fiction about renewal in Osinachi’s home country, evidenced by the presence of Omo detergent, the first detergent sold and marketed in Nigeria, the packaging reflecting the original packaging used when the brand was introduced there.
Like Alex Katz, Osinachi isn’t concerned with what’s out there in the distance but the people and places in his immediate surroundings, with a dash of imagination for good measure.
Bringing AFRICA HERE
Since the beginning, Osinachi has been a stalwart champion of contemporary African artists in web3, a passion that saw its first great fruiting in his 2022 AFRICA HERE incubator in collaboration with MakersPlace and continues to today. There’s a broader philosophical view at play here, alluded to earlier:
“I see art as a sort of empty room. If you come into an empty room, and you tell a designer to help you decorate the room and you come into the room later, and there’s a bed frame here, a bed frame there, and a bed frame there. It’s all bed frames. That wouldn’t be nice. Right?
“Instead, you can come into the room and see different furnishings, the different voices that come into the space and make the space as beautiful as it is.”
From the point of view of an African artist, the room that is capital-a Art hasn’t made much of any accommodation for contemporary African artists, especially those working digitally. Osinachi sees his “OG status” as the first big African art star of web3 as a point of leverage, a blessing he can use to lift up so many other talented African artists who are not being seen.
In his art, Osinachi champions the stories he sees around him, and in his efforts to lift up African digital artists, he champions the stories that he cannot tell. These efforts amount to clearing out some of those bed frames to make room for a more well-balanced room of Art.
To balance out the Room of Art nesting in your own mind, check out some of the interviews we’ve done with some great African digital artists:
