ARTS & REVIEW\\ ART ENTREPRENEUR THOUGHT PYRAMID TRAIL OF FAME
A previous stint as a gallery attendant in the old Nimbus Art Centre, Lagos stood Jeff Ajueshi in good stead to esta Centre a decade ago in Abuja. This year, the gallery has begun operations in Lagos from a prime location in the Okechukwu Uwaezuoke report
Mornings at the Nimbus Art Centre were usually this quiet. Somewhere at its main exhibition hall, an ebony-complexioned youth, was gesticulating, as he tried so hard to make himself understood to his much older interlocutor. The latter, a standoffish art writer, was obviously in a surly mood that morning. Apparently, the youth’s energy and enthusiasm did little or nothing to lighten it.
Back then, the thriving art gallery was gradually morphing into a cultural centre and was arguably the leading art space in Lagos. It used to occupy a sprawling duplex building, which was in a large compound, opposite the present location of Bogobiri House, along Maitama Sule Street in South West Ikoyi.
The youth, whose name was Jeff Ajueshi, was one of the gallery attendants, employed by the Nimbus Art Gallery’s director and curator, Chike Nwagbogu. Anyone could easily tell from the way his eyes gleamed as he spoke that he was really in his element.
Years later, fate beckoned. This was sometime in 2007. Ajueshi found himself in Abuja. In this Nigeria’s culturally-sterile capital city, it occurred to him that he could replicate his Nimbus Art Centre experience and personal vision.
Thought Pyramid Art Centre thus emerged from out of the blue and stands proudly in Wuse II, one of Abuja’s trendy neighbourhoods. It had first started in a more modest rented space as Thought Pyramid Gallery before moving into its own purpose-built space eight years later in the same neighbourhood.
At its new two-storey edifice, situated along Libreville Road, the art centre provides training facilities to help budding artists become more proficient.
Thus, this space barged into the art public’s consciousness as the federal capital’s art hub. Reports about the visits of such distinguished international personalities as the former German president, Joachim Gauck, to the gallery competed with those of exhibition openings graced by diplomats, local dignitaries and aficionados. It was not surprising, therefore, that it was listed among West Africa’s top ten galleries by howafrica.com.
Shortly before this bold Abuja venture, Ajueshi had established a facility he called FACT – acronym for Foundation for Arts and Creative Training – in his home town Oghara in Delta State. His aim, he said, was to empower the hordes of unemployed youths in the locality.
This probably would explain his relatively recent endowment of two category prizes in the annual Life in My City Art Festival (known as LIMCAF). The prizes, worth N100,000 each, reward the best artists emerging from the Edo/ Delta axis and Abuja.
Ajueshi’s venture into the Abuja art scene was as audacious as it was illogical. First, there was the fact that the bulk of the activities in the city swirled around politics. Then, even the handful of its already existing art ventures hardly seemed to be thriving. “We knew that Abuja was not a city in which people were so much interested in the art,” the art entrepreneur acknowledged. “But, do not forget that it was not as if the Abuja people had an offer for visual art interface that they turned down.”
Actually, all it took was a healthy blend of passion and patience for the Abuja venture to pay off. Abuja residents gradually warmed up to visual arts events, thanks to the efforts of Thought Pyramid Art Centre and a miscellany of other art galleries including the National Gallery of Art. “I can assure you that in a very short while, Abuja would give Lagos a very stiff competition, in terms of art patronage,” Ajueshi enthused.
In addition, promoting art anywhere at a time of a gloomy economic climate was fraught with risks. “That period came as a disaster; it was rough [what] with plummeting home values, sinking stock prices, and frozen credit markets. So, we had to pay more heed to our peculiar risk management principle which I hold dearly to heart. We were able to spot the flip side of risk which is an opportunity for survival. Of course, you know that there is a direct relationship between risk and reward: the greater the potential upside, the greater the risks involved, though not in all cases. We then tried to avoid perfection because it became obvious to us that it would be stupid for us to think that any product, especially artwork, would ever be ‘finished’ in the sense that it would make all users completely happy.”
Thought Pyramid Art Centre’s entrance into the Lagos scene this year was somewhat surreptitious. It had quietly established itself along Norman Williams Street in South West Ikoyi – a stone’s throw away from where the Nimbus Art Gallery (the precursor of the Nimbus Art Centre) had first