Susanne Wenger, 1915-2009
Biography

Susanne Wenger was born on 4 July 1915 in Graz, Austria, and died on 12 January 2009 in Oshogbo, Nigeria, the town she had made her home for almost six decades. Trained at the Graz School of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she became one of the central figures of the Oshogbo art movement and the founder of its "New Sacred Art."

In Paris in 1949 she met the linguist Ulli Beier; the couple married in London the following year, a requirement of Beier's post as a phoneticist in Ibadan, and emigrated together to Nigeria in 1950. Settling first in the village of Ede, Wenger contracted tuberculosis, and it was during her recovery that she was introduced — by Ajagemo, a priest of Obatala — to Yoruba language, cosmology and religion.

She was subsequently initiated into the cults of Obatala, Sopona and Ogboni, married the local drummer Lasisi Ayansola Onilu, and received the chieftaincy title Adunni Olorisha. Though she and Ulli Beier divorced, both remained closely tied to Oshogbo's artistic life through the 1960s.

Wenger settled permanently in Oshogbo in 1961, building an artists' cooperative with local craftsmen and developing "New Sacred Art": an archaic-modern visual language depicting Yoruba orisa alongside the everyday lives of the community around her. Her most significant undertaking began after a high priestess of Osun asked her to help save the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove from commercial encroachment and termite damage. Working with the Public Works Department and local artists, Wenger restored the grove's shrines and raised new sculptural works in cement and wood — among them the towering shrines to Alajere and Iyamoopo — becoming, in effect, its lifelong guardian.

The grove was declared a Nigerian national monument in 1965 and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005, the same year Wenger was made a Member of the Order of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in recognition of her work.

[read more about the Oshogbo School here]