Daughters With Wings

202 Gallery is proud to announce Daughters With Wings, a powerful group exhibition curated by celebrated Nigerian poet and cultural thinker, Ijeoma Umebinyuo. 

Opening on May 10, 2025, Daughters With Wings marks Umebinyuo’s curatorial debut and brings together eight Nigerian women artists living and working in Nigeria: Adaoma Nnabeze, Chinaza Nkemka, Titilola Fagbemi, Hannatu Ageni-Yusuf, Victoria Makinde, Ashiata Shaibu, Goodness Nnabeze, Kelechi Chiwendu.

Rooted in Umebinyuo’s lifelong advocacy and intellectual practice, Daughters With Wings continues the dialogue she began in her widely acclaimed TEDx talk Dismantling the Culture of Silence and her seminal poetry collection Questions for Ada. Known for her contributions to womanist literature and praised by National NOW as an important voice in global feminist discourse, Umebinyuo now turns to visual art as a medium of resistance and reflection.

The exhibition centers on the radical act of bearing witness through art. In a landscape where the creative voices of West African women are often marginalized or overlooked, Daughters With Wings celebrates their work with the visibility and reverence it deserves. Through painting, drawings, and mixed media installations, the featured artists navigate personal and collective histories, confronting systems of patriarchy while asserting agency and voice.

Daughters With Wings asks vital questions: How are women in Nigeria resisting through their art? How is their work being supported, seen, and sustained? What does it mean to be a daughter—of lineage, of culture, of resistance—and how does that shape creative expression today?

This timely exhibition stands as a cultural timestamp and a space for contemplation, offering art not as a plea for validation, but as a firm declaration of presence, resilience, and transformation. Each work contributes to the dismantling of silence, building a chorus that is both intimate and global in its resonance.

Daughters with Wings runs till July 26, 2025

CURATORIAL STATEMENT
IJEOMA UMEBINYUO: DAUGHTERS WITH WINGS
The exhibition Daughters With Wings draws its title from a poem in Questions for Ada, the 2015
poetry collection by Ijeoma Umebinyuo. The poem, address the history of patriarchy and the
culture of silence, contains these lines:
"Nobody warned you
The women whose feet
You cut from running
Would give birth to
Daughters with wings.”

This exhibition is an extension of that poetic warning—a visual testimony. In tracing the
history of contemporary Nigerian art, curator Ijeoma Umebinyuo observed a striking omission:
women artists from the 1940s through the 1970s are largely missing from the canon. While
figures such as Uche Okeke, Ben Enwonwu, Aina Onabolu, Demas Nwoko, and Yusuf Grillo are
widely cited, the women of their era are scarcely remembered. This absence raised critical
questions: Were women not creating? Or were they simply unseen? What cultural and structural
barriers silenced them? These inquiries shaped the curatorial vision of Daughters With Wings.
The exhibition builds on Umebinyuo’s interest beyond writing. Her 2017 TEDx
talk, Dismantling the Culture of Silence, explored themes of voice, erasure, and cultural
inheritance—ideas that are also present in her poetry, essays, and speeches. Recognized by
National NOW as a major voice in womanist literature, Umebinyuo has consistently used her
platform to challenge the imposed silences on Black women. Daughters With Wings continues
that work through visual language, placing the creative resistance of Nigerian women artists at
the forefront. It asks: How are women in Nigeria using art to challenge silence? How are they
represented, valued, and remembered? What does it mean to build one's own wings in a
patriarchal society, to ascend on the strength of forgotten foremothers?

Each featured women artist offers a unique response. A gathering of the works of eight
women artists. Goodness Nnabeze adopts the dynamic line work popularized by Uche Okeke to
visualize energy and vitality. Titilola Fagbemi renders women in solidarity—standing,
challenging, uplifting. Victoria Makinde’s vivid reds evoke emotional vulnerability with bold
intensity. Hannatu Ageni-Yusuf’s blue-and-gold portrait(s) demand recognition; her subjects
meet the viewer’s gaze with unflinching presence. Ashiata’s soft brushstrokes and palettes invite
stillness and reflection on loneliness, sisterhood and quiet strength. Chinaza Nkemka’s
expressive paintings celebrate unapologetic existence, while Kelechi Chinwendu draws on Igbo
cosmology to depict Ikenga, a symbol of strength. Adaoma Nnabeze’s thread-based installation
uses fiber and texture to layer memory and emotion, offering tactile storytelling rooted, her use
of various mediums present work that investigates.

In a global art world that often sidelines African women living on the continent, Daughters With
Wings is an assertion of visibility. This exhibition is a study of visual forms through resistance,
identity, and the power of owning your narrative. The exhibition does not seek external
validation—it demands recognition. It offers a space to bear witness: for those who see, for those
who remember, and for those who know the courage it takes to create amid erasure, against the
noise that demands your silence. This is a cultural timestamp, a living archive, and a testament.

For daughters who dare to fly.