Jimoh Buraimoh, 1943
Biography

Chief Jimoh Buraimoh was born in 1943 in Osogbo, Osun State, Nigeria, into a Muslim branch of the town's royal family. He worked as a lighting technician for Duro Ladipo's theatre before attending Georgina Beier's 1964 Osogbo workshop, where he learned printmaking, painting and tile inlay.

Buraimoh is credited as Africa's first bead painter, having developed in 1964 a technique of stringing beads onto cotton thread and adhering them to board, inspired by the traditional beaded crowns, cloaks and staffs of Yoruba royalty. The raised surfaces and illusion of depth this creates became his signature form.

His first exhibition of bead paintings, organised by the Goethe-Institut in Lagos in 1967, launched a career that has since taken his large-scale mosaic murals to public spaces across Nigeria, Europe and the United States, with work held in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.