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In 1924 an elaborately carved doublepaneled palace door from the British colony of Nigeria was displayed in the Nigerian Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley, England (Fig. 1). It had been borrowed from the Ogoga of Ikere, ruler of one of the smaller Ekiti kingdoms in northeastern Yorubaland. According to an article about the exhibition in West Africa magazine, the British Museum considered the door to be "the finest piece of West African carving that had ever reached England" (Lawrence 1924:1214). When the exhibition closed in 1925, the museum successfully negotiated with the Ogoga to acquire the work. Since then, millions of visitors have viewed it in London. First reproduced in the British Museum's Handbook of the Ethnographical Collections in 1925, the door has appeared in numerous books about African art, history, and culture. It has become a famous work of art.
Who carved the palace door from Ikere? It is unlikely that the British official who selected it for the exhibition ever inquired about the sculptor. Because of racial and cultural biases that prevailed at the time, few ethnographers and collectors were interested in knowing the answer to the question "Who made this?" The sculptor's name was not known in Europe until after World War II, when Philip A. Allison, then a British forester stationed in Nigeria, visited the British Museum. He identified the maker as Olowere, commonly known as Olowe of Ise (ca. 1875-ca. 1938).
Like many "anonymous" African artists, Olowe was well known in his hometown and beyond, the number and diverse nature of his commissions attesting to the fact that his talent was greatly appreciated by his own people. His patrons, Yoruba rulers and wealthy individuals who commissioned architectural sculptures and other objects, resided in several towns-including Ikere, Akure, Owo, Qgbagi, and Idanre-within a sixtymile radius of Ise in the Ekiti region of Nigeria. Today Olowe of Ise is considered by many Western art historians and art collectors to be the most important Yoruba artist of the twentieth century.
I recently completed a monograph about this sculptor that addresses his unique style of carving, the sculptures he created for his patrons, and the sources I used to reconstruct his biography (Walker 1998). It includes a catalogue raisonne of forty-five...