Nigeria’s foremost art collector and founder of the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation tells us about his romance with, and support for art.

When the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF) started its graduate fellowship programme in Nigerian visual art and culture for foreign scholars in 2009, its founder, Yemisi Shyllon, did not know that it would be this successful. Between then and 2011, seven scholars including Ian Bourland of the University of Chicago; Janine Systma of the University of Wisconsin; Rachel Amaa-asaa Engman of Stanford University and Erica Agyeman of Columbia University, all in the United States,  have benefited from the fellowship. Other beneficiaries who have spent about a month in Nigeria advancing their research and getting to know more about the country’s art include Andrea Bauer of the University of Vienna, Austria; Nomusa Makhubu of Rhodes University, South Africa and Kathleen Coates of the Iziko Museum of Cape Town, South Africa.

“It‘s been a huge success story,” Shyllon says while appraising the fellowship. “I must say the achievements, particularly in exposing Nigerian art, have surpassed my expectations. It has helped to contribute to positioning Nigerian art in the global scene and in making Nigerian art a topic of research by universities outside this country. The fellowship is designed to sell Nigeria’s art, culture and tradition to the world; to let the world know that there is something good about us and I tell you many of the scholars have expressed surprise with what they saw. In fact, one of them who is of African origin, was very happy to find for the first time in her life, beautiful forms like her because  where she grew up, they made her feel she was next to monkeys. The only history of Africa they taught her was the slave trade and that there is very little that can be said about Africa’s contributions to the world.”

For knowledge and career
Apart from enriching their knowledge, the fellowship has also helped some beneficiaries advance in their careers. Notes Shyllon: “Bourland disclosed that he had been reading about Aina Onabolu but had never had the privilege of seeing his works because Onabolu concentrated on being a teacher and never marketed his works. I must say that OYASAF is the first collector that put forward Aina Onabolu’s work to be sold by a global auction house.” The same, he adds, is true for Makhubu and Systma.  “Makhubu, who explored    the relationship between visual art and Nollywood, is now a lecturer thanks to our recommendation. She wrote us to recommend her for promotion as a lecturer and the letter from OYASAF aided her. When she returned to South Africa, she still came back to Nigeria on invitation to the Pan African University to give a lecture. She had interacted so much with art scholars and artists in Nigeria that she could talk authoritatively about Nigerian arts.  Janine Systma who came to study the Ona School of Art sought the recommendation of OYASAF for a Fulbright scholarship which she got. She returned as an affiliate of OYASAF, spent a year and ended up curating the Ona School of Art Exhibition at the Civic Centre last year. Her presence generated the controversy that led us into discovering the origin of the Ona School of Art.”

Asked his take on the ‘Ona’ controversy which pitted US-based Moyo Okediji against Mufu Onifade and Kunle Filani, Shyllon says, “I will not want to give you my own take but if you read through Moyo Okediji, Kunle Filani and Mufu Onifade with a very clear mind, we lawyers say ‘res ipsa loquitor (the matter speaks for itself).”

OYASAF’s relationship with the scholars, Shyllon explains, doesn’t end with the conclusion of their fellowships. “We make it a habit that once you leave, we keep on updating you about what is happening in the Foundation and we also keep updating you about what is happening in Nigerian art. I must use this opportunity to commend Janine Systma, Erica Agyeman and Nomusa Makhubu. They have been good representatives of OYASAF.”

Programmes for Nigerian artists
Happily, the fellowship designed to sell Nigeria’s art, culture and tradition globally and whose first beneficiary for 2012 will arrive in March, is not the sole intervention of OYASAF which holds over 6000 artworks. There are also programmes for Nigerian artists as Shyllon explains:  “The programmes for Nigeria are designed to develop the entrepreneurship skill of Nigerian artists and encourage them to further whatever they are doing. There is also the photography competition held in 2009 and 2010 and the exhibition by the winners which has since graduated into photo-mapping Nigeria by our in-house photographer, Ariyo Oguntimehin. He has just come back from Benin Republic where he covered the Voodoo Festival that finished January 11. He has covered the Ofalla Festival in Onitsha, Osun Osogbo, Igue Festival in Benin, Eyo in Lagos and the Calabar Carnival. He will go to this year’s Argungu Fishing Festival in March.”  The photo-mapping project, he adds, “is going on well. For now we are storing the images that we have. We will come out with what we want to do with them later.”

The entrepreneurship workshop for artists held last year in collaboration with the University of Lagos was another intervention by the Foundation. Will there be another this year?

“You are going to have a repeat but it’s not going to be in April,” Shyllon, an engineer, lawyer, stock broker and marketer discloses. “We are working with the University to do it in June for some private reasons. What we did last year was very successful to the extent that we are going to do another one with YABATECH. It was such a huge success and we couldn’t accommodate all the people that applied. We want to expand the scope of the workshop to include other areas of art that we need to draw the attention of artists and potential artists to. You must recall that workshops build artists. A typical example is Bruce Onobrakpeya who, on the death of Ulli Beier, admitted that he owes his foray into printmaking to Beier. Duro Ladipo also gained a lot from Beier’s workshops. We will continue and build it up to a level that people may want to join us in widening its scope and spreading it outside Lagos.”

Copyright and artists
A renowned art collector and certified auctioneer, one asks Shyllon about Mufu Onifade’s contention in an article about artists being hard done by collectors. Onifade contended that whenever artworks are sold at auctions, the artist ought to get something from the sale, no matter how little. Does Shyllon agree with him?  His reply: “Mufu Onifade is a fantastic journalist and has the right to write whatever he likes. An artist who sells his work to a collector only has the right to claim copyright if that work is used for any other thing apart from what it was intended when the collector bought it. Recently, I got in touch with Abayomi Barber through someone. I have his ‘Ali Maigoro’ in plaster and I have his ‘Ola I’ and ‘Ola II’ in plaster and was increasingly worried that the works in plaster might accidentally break one day where they are kept.  Knowing full well as a lawyer that I can’t reproduce Barber’s work without his consent and license to do so, I drafted an agreement with him to reproduce his work in bronze. That is where copyright comes in. If I buy an artist’s work and I sell it in an auction, the artist can go and follow up that work when it has left my hand to see whether the person who bought it is going to reproduce it, going to use if for commercial purposes or what it was not originally intended for at the time the artist sold it to me.  Many artists are not informed and when they read people like Mufu, they go on repeating him because they have not bothered to find out.”

Storage issues
Shyllon’s lush garden containing artworks, exotic birds and animals appears to have grown bigger since one’s last visit. Is storing the beautiful artworks not going to be a problem later? “That’s one of the greatest problems I have with the collection, it is growing every day. If you say it has grown, it is not that it has grown, it is that it keeps changing because when a new work comes and I find it much more interesting than what is sitting on ground, I’ll remove it and put it somewhere else.  It is getting to a stage that one is beginning to ask himself, what one is going to do with these works such that posterity will benefit.”

No hard feelings
Minister of Culture, Tourism and National Orientation, Edem Duke, commended Shyllon, Nigeria’s number one art collector at the 2011 Art Expo and promised to bring Director General of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, who visited Nigeria in December, to see his collection.  Sadly, the Minister and his guest didn’t make it but Shyllon doesn’t hold it against him.  “I must thank him for giving me the recognition as number one art collector in Nigeria. I’m very grateful to this round peg in a round hole minister. He is probably Nigeria’s first competent Minister for Culture, Tourism and National  Orientation because I’ve interacted with one or two in the past and I must say that listening to Edem Duke speak extempore about art, I was pleasantly surprised and pleased that a Minister of the Federal Republic can be so endowed. Even when Lagarde went to the National Museum, she could not spend more than 10 minutes so I can understand why the Minister could not fulfil his promise to bring the IMF Director to OYASAF. However, I look forward to him inviting international visitors to Nigeria to promote this country because OYASAF is a one-stop collection of the past and the present of Nigerian art.”

Unique happiness
Why do you do collect artworks, support art and what makes you continue? One asks Shyllon.  “I have looked at my life and I wonder what it would have been today if I wasn’t involved in art. It creates an opportunity for me to meet people that I would never have met, people of like minds. Two, it creates for me an academic contact with my past in terms of my country’s culture and tradition. It is an avenue for me to understand human beings better; it creates a series of activities for me to enjoy every moment of my life.

It’s a thing of joy for me to wake up in the morning to move an artwork from one point to the other.  It is a form of happiness for me and inviting people to come and enjoy this happiness creates happiness for me.

“On one occasion, one of my collaborators told me why is it that you have to be taking these scholars around yourself, does it not belittle you? I replied that anything I do for arts never belittles me because I love it.  Every day I acquire knowledge about who my people - the whole of Africa, are.  A man came here and made the stupid mistake of telling me Africans did not have their own form of writing and I told him you are wrong. We used to write. The ‘insibidi’ that predates the arrival of the Caucasian race to Nigeria by 400 years; the ‘asokan’ way of writing by the Yoruba predates the arrival of the Caucasian race; the ‘ebiebie’ form of writing by the people of the Delta predates the arrival of the whites.

“Art gives you knowledge that is very unique. Art has made it possible for me to start reading about the history of the world from when man was in the cave to the end of the 20th century. I have a book in the library, 5000 pages about the history of the world. What makes me go through books like that? It’s my contact with Nigerian and African art and when I see some of the works done by my forefathers, I question statements like we did not have a way of writing. By collecting art over decades, I began to see what others have not been able to see and to question established beliefs. The academic element of art is very important to me; it replaces my voyage into engineering, law, stock broking, finance and marketing. I’m studying more because as you get older, you get more esoteric. I am questioning what it is that is not; what is it that should be. That’s the level in which I am operating.”