By K.D. Norris
Yinka Shonibare, the featured artist as Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park reopens its sculpture galleries after more than a year of renovations, is commanding in his artistic vision and, yet, undoubtedly playful as well.
Shonibare — with “CBE” (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) attached to his name when necessary — is a self-proclaimed “postcolonial hybrid” of British-Nigerian heritage who has emerged as one of the leading artists in the global art world, with his works maybe best known for a playful combination of colorful Dutch wax-fabric patterns popular in West Africa with the fashion of upper-class Victorian culture.
When the Garden’s remodeled sculpture galleries reopen in April, Shonibare’s works of the past three decades, many never shown in the United States, including sculptures, paintings, photographs, collages, embroidery, and film, will be featured in the exhibition “Yinka Shonibare CBE: Planets in My Head.” The show will run thorough October.
“Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park is thrilled to host this major exhibition, one of Yinka Shonibare’s largest in the United States,” David Hooker, President & CEO of Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, said in supplied material. “It will be a wonderful opportunity for hundreds of thousands of guests to experience works never before seen in the U.S. and learn more about this fascinating artist.”
The man and his works
Born in London to Nigerian parents and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, where he spoke Yoruba at home and English at the private school he attended, Shonibare has a bicultural heritage, according to supplied material. “His identity is shaped by the postcolonial experience of being in two places at once; of growing up located between center and margin of the British Empire.”
Postcolonialism and hybridity define his artistic and political identity, and are major themes in his artistic output. While Shonibare embraces cross-cultural mixing and exchange in his work, he never shies from alluding to the postcolonial scars of cultural imperialism and exploitation.
“As this exhibition reveals, Shonibare thinks globally and uses his artistic imagination to comment on colonialism, art history, environment, education, knowledge, food justice, and other subjects of universal concern,” the Meijer Gardens’ announcement states.
Shonibare, born 1962, studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London (1989) and received his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (1991), according to the biography on his website.
His interdisciplinary practice uses “citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation. Through examining race, class and the construction of cultural identity, his works comment on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their respective economic and political histories.”
In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2008. In 2013, he was elected a Royal Academician, and was awarded the honour of ‘Commander of the Order of the British Empire’ in 2019. His installation ‘The British Library’ was acquired by Tate in 2019 and is currently on display at Tate Modern, London.
More recently, Shonibare was awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award. His works are in collections of, in addition to the Tate, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Creatures of the Mappa-Mundi – Bonnacon’. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. (Supplied photo by Mark Blower) 
Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Creatures of the Mappa-Mundi – Bonnacon’ (detail). Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. (Supplied photo by Mark Blower)
Exhibit-related special events
Among the many exhibition-related events are:
“A Fashion in Contemporary Art” — Saturday, June 18, a discussion by Suzanne Eberle, PhD, Professor Emerita, Kendall College of Art and Design.
“Abundance and Scarcity: Yinka Shonibare CBE and Food Justice” — Saturday, July 16, a discussion by Jochen Wierich, PhD, Assistant Curator & Researcher at Meijer Gardens and Associate Professor of Art History at Aquinas College.
“Complex Embodiment: Yinka Shonibare and Disability” — Saturdays, Sept. 3 and 10, with Jessica Cooley, PhD candidate in the art history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Yinka Shonibare and the Pan-African Imagination” — Saturday, Oct. 1, 1with Antawan Byrd, PhD candidate in the art history department at Northwestern University, Weinberg Fellow, associate curator of photography and media at the Art Institute of Chicago.
A full list of exhibition activities can be found at MeijerGardens.org/Shonibare.
For more information about Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, visit meijergardens.org.
