Lamidi Fakeye and the Fakeye Family

A family of sculptors can pass down tools, techniques and a repertoire of forms. What each artist makes of that inheritance is another matter. Lamidi Fakeye and the carvers of the Fakeye family show how Yoruba wood sculpture developed through individual choices as well as shared knowledge.

Lamidi Olonade Fakeye (1928–2009) was born in Ila-Orangun, in southwestern Nigeria, into a family whose carving practice extended across several generations. His first teacher was his father, Akobi Ogun Fakeye. Before international recognition, there were the ordinary demands of a working carver: toys, bowls, ladles and household objects. Learning to carve meant learning to understand a material, to control tools and to make objects that people would use.

That family training was enlarged at the Catholic workshop in Oye-Ekiti, where Lamidi apprenticed under George Bamidele Arowoogun. Established under the direction of Father Kevin Carroll, the workshop brought Yoruba carving into contact with Christian commissions. Lamidi, himself a Muslim, worked across these different systems of belief. The breadth of his subjects reminds us that the identity of the maker and the purpose of a commission need not be the same.

A carved post or door panel is more than decoration. Figures, gestures, implements and their arrangement can identify religious responsibilities or establish a hierarchy. In Lamidi’s Aworo Ereju: A Priest for Oro, held by Hampton University Museum, the seated priest occupies a privileged position among standing attendants; musicians and other participants extend the scene. The composition gives the viewer a structure through which to read a collective event, rather than presenting an isolated likeness.

Lamidi’s figures are recognisable through broad facial planes and simplified bodies, set against carefully worked clothing, hair and surface ornament. The North Carolina Museum of Art’s veranda posts bring divination and the worship of Shango, Oshun and Ogun into this sculptural language. Their figures carry particular associations, but their balance, rhythm and contrasts also reward close looking without requiring the viewer to decode every reference.

Exhibitions, travel and teaching carried this practice into new settings. Lamidi exhibited through the British Council, studied in Paris and worked with universities in Nigeria and the United States. Museum collections gave works originally associated with architecture, worship or patronage another life as individually attributed sculptures. His career therefore complicates the separation often made between inherited African carving traditions and modern artistic authorship: both were active within the same practice.

The family should not, however, be reduced to Lamidi’s biography. Akin Fakeye, born in 1936, learned within the family and trained with Lamidi before establishing his own studio in 1968. Apprenticeship continued in turn through his workshop and sons. A signed veranda post from the early 1960s is now in the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. Its inclusion in the museum’s 2016 exhibition Inventory: New Works and Conversations around African Art places his work within a wider discussion of modern African art.

Gani Fakeye, also known as Ganiyu Alawode Fakeye, followed another route through the same network. Aderonke Adesanya records his birth in 1941, childhood in Ekan, training with Lamidi and the establishment of an independent workshop in Ibadan in 1967. A visitor to that workshop in 1971, John Buckels, recalls selecting iroko carvings of a flute player and a woman carrying a casket. Such encounters show sculpture circulating through direct contact with the maker as well as through institutions.

Adesanya’s study considers several members of the lineage, including Joseph and Bisi, alongside Lamidi, Akin and Gani. Its attention to different hands and workshops is essential. A shared surname is evidence of a relationship; it does not make every sculpture interchangeable. Attribution asks us to attend to the individual maker, the handling of form and the circumstances in which an object was produced.

Seen together, the Fakeye sculptors offer a history of continuity that leaves room for change. Knowledge travelled through the family, but it also travelled between workshops, patrons, towns and museums. The result is neither a single family style frozen in time nor a sequence in which one artist simply replaces another. It is a continuing conversation in wood, in which inherited forms become the means for distinct artistic lives.

Works by Akin Fakeye and Gani Fakeye will be presented by African Contemporary soon. Their biographies provide a starting point for discovering the artists behind those sculptures.