Georgina Beier, 1938-2021
Biography

Georgina Beier was born in 1938 in Sutton, near London, and became one of the driving forces behind the Mbari Mbayo workshops in Oshogbo, Nigeria — the informal art sessions that shaped an entire generation of self-taught Yoruba artists.

After briefly attending Kingston Art School, she left formal training behind, the first of what she described as a lifelong resistance to institutional constraints. At nineteen she founded her own decorating business, Mural Contractors Ltd, before moving to Nigeria in 1959, where she joined the circle of artists around the Zaria Art Society.

In 1963 she settled in Oshogbo and took over leadership of the Mbari Mbayo Club workshops. She married the linguist and writer Ulli Beier in 1964, who had previously been married to the artist Susanne Wenger. Where earlier Mbari Mbayo sessions had emphasised free experimentation, Beier introduced more structured technical training, teaching printmaking, woodcut and mural painting to artists including Rufus Ogundele and Jacob Afolabi, several of whom she invited to work directly in her home.

Beier worked across an unusually wide range of media herself — painting, graphic art, sculpture, batik, mosaic and metal — and her own visual language developed alongside that of her students. She designed murals, theatre sets, book illustrations and the Igunnuko costumes for the Yoruba Alarinjo masquerade troupe, later exhibited at the Bayreuth Opera House in 1992.

She left Nigeria in the late 1960s for Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where she worked alongside local artists such as Akis and Mathias Kauage and founded Hara Hara Prints, a textile workshop that gave women economic independence through design. She went on to co-found the Iwalewahaus centre for African art in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1981, and settled permanently in Sydney, Australia, from 1997, where she continued to paint and produce metal sculpture until her death in 2021.

[read more about the Oshogbo School here]