Ohioma Ifounu Pogoson is a Senior Research Fellow (Visual Arts) at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria where he teaches postgraduate courses in African Art and Tourism. He received a Ph.D in Visual Arts from the University of Ibadan in 1990. In 1997 with Canadian Jeff Wall, one of this century’s greatest artist-photographers as Juror, he was selected for the prestigious fellowship of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany where he undertook a six month study of the social history of Benin arts after one hundred years in Germany.
He contributed to the 2001 BBC World Service Story of Africa. He was team member (2002-2004) of the College and University Affiliations Programme (CUAP) of the United States State department grant No ASJY 1333 on ‘ Enhancing Curricula and Research with Minority Cultures’. This grant enabled him to visit the United Sates annually to teach and examine African studies based curricula in Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. In 2006 he won the MacArthur Foundation grant that enabled him carry out comparative studies of Anglophone and Francophone museums across west Africa and Britain, especially in Cambridge University.
He is recent recipient of one of the four 2012/2013 University of Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Programme on Art and Museums in Africa. He is well published and has collaborated with scholars from Nigeria and the US where he has curated exhibitions of African Arts from Nigeria. He continues to write and conduct research into the visual arts of Southern Nigeria with recent preference for Yoruba and Edo arts. His more recent publications include three edited books Photography in History, History in Photography: The Ikons of Dotun Okubanjo, ARPS (2011) and Life’s Fragile Fictions: The Drawings and Paintings of Moyo Ogundipe (2011), Cequel: Olu Amoda, Shattering the Barriers of Artistic Conventions (2012) and a joint book publication with Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon, A Conversation with Lamidi Fakeye (2012).
Since 2008, he has been the Consultant Curator of Africa’s largest private art collection, Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF) based in Lagos, Nigeria. He has been honorary Curator of the Museum of the Institute of African Studies (MIAS) for the last ten years where he has curated over fifteen exhibitions, ten of which are of the works of major contemporary Nigerian artists.
