Who gets to shape the future of Nigerian art?
In 2025, the answer may no longer rest solely in the hands of institutional stakeholders. It also lies with artists bridging traditional legacies and contemporary resonance, curators charting visionary paths, and collectors who aren’t swayed by acclaim but guided by meaning. As Nigeria navigates the dual forces of shifting economic realities and rising global visibility, its art scene is becoming more intentional, self-determined, and culturally anchored.
As the ecosystem evolves, these emerging patterns offer insight into the forces driving the market forward.
Narrative-Driven Practice
Across Nigeria’s art landscape, thematic storytelling has become a curatorial tool and a driving force within artistic practice. By constructing layered, personal narratives that navigate themes like identity, history, and many others, artists are using their work to construct layered, often deeply personal testimonies that speak to both local histories and global conversations.
This appears in Ashiata Shaibu-Salami’s artistic practice, where she uses quiet, abstracted figures to evoke the often hidden emotional landscapes. Through acrylic, paper collage on canvas, and other art media, she creates reflective spaces that mirror the internal terrain, portraying sites of vulnerability, healing, expression and quiet strength. In Underland, a group exhibition where four women artists use landscapes and natural elements as storytelling tools, Ashiata’s work extends this approach through her practice. Her figures become part of a broader dialogue on identity, belonging, and the invisible elements that shape who we are.
Likewise, in Chigozie Obi’s A Woman’s World, fire becomes both metaphor and memory which captures the quiet rage, exhaustion, and resilience that shape the everyday reality of womanhood. Rooted in lived and collective experience, the work bears a theme of identity: insisting that even amidst recurring injustice, solidarity and voice remain forms of resistance.
Inherently, these exhibitions move beyond aesthetics or passive display, through narrative-driven practices, they become sites of critical reflection and dialogue, inviting viewers to not just observe, but to listen.
Textile as Testimony
Textile has moved from embellishment to embodiment. As a tool for storytelling, artists are drawing on its history and essence to capture identity, heritage, and social conditions by using the fabric as a way to document, preserve, and reflect. These works function as testimony, where thread becomes narrative and cloth serves as a record.
In ÁKÚ-LUÓ-ÚNÓ at the Wunika Mukan Gallery, Nduka Ikechukwu reflects on the Igbo philosophies of reciprocity, mentorship, guidance and collective progress as pathways to societal regeneration. Through handwoven forms made from industrial strap belts, materials that speak of labour and endurance, he constructs layered works that embody history, resilience, and responsibility. Textile, in his hands, becomes a language of testimony: bearing ancestral processes, critiquing individualistic systems, and proposing community as a form of care.
Beyond the White Cube and into Immersion as Invitation
Artists, curators and galleries are moving beyond the traditional gallery format to create immersive encounters that blur the line between viewer and work. Through these sound, installation, video, and spatial experiences, immersion becomes a method of storytelling that invites audiences to not just witness, but to feel, remember, and respond.
Beyond the Seen, an exhibition curated by Seju Alero Mike for the Harvard Divinity School, showcases works by Ramon Shitta, Ifedolapo Arolawun, and Noah Okwudini to explore African spirituality through immersive art, sound and technology. Blending ancestral knowledge with AI and augmented reality, the exhibition moves beyond static presentation and transforms the viewing experience into one of spiritual inquiry, interactive presence, and cultural reclamation.
At its core
The future of Nigerian art is being shaped from within by those creating, curating, and collecting with meaning. As the landscape evolves, these trends point to an ecosystem ready to lead on its own terms.