The Brooklyn-based British Nigerian artist tells Tatler how he’s forging his future from art history’s diverse legacies
There was a time, as a fresh art graduate, that artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones attempted to sell his artwork to his family members. He was not successful. “I went through that phase that every artist goes through at the start, where you’re promoting yourself and throwing yourself out there, like a newspaper or something”, the artist recalls. “Those were some really defeating moments, where you were like: sh*t, even my family aren’t trying to buy my art.”
“I’m talking about this like it was a really long time ago, but it wasn’t; [it was] just markedly different to now,” the artist says, observing the starkly apparent changes in art education and the art world which have occurred in the eight years since the 30-year-old British Nigerian artist graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University. “Now you see a lot of students coming out of really good programmes and going straight into having support from collectors and opportunities to show their works”, he says. “There seem to be more viable career options at the post-graduate level, but when I finished, I didn’t feel like my programme prepped us for it.”
In case you missed it: From Shanghai to Rome, this Hong Kong artist’s dragon horses are spreading love, compassion and art in our ‘messed up’ world
Calls for more diversity and inclusivity in the teaching of art history, as well as in the making of exhibitions, and for more viable financial opportunities for young, emerging artists resulted in what Adeniyi-Jones felt were rapid changes in the US, but the reaction in the UK was much slower. Feeling a lack of resonance with and representation in his art history education prompted him to pursue his MFA at Yale University; being in the US meant he met more artists of colour and was exposed to a Black art history centred around largely African Americans, as well as Black British artists whose work has only recently been documented and taught as part of the mainstream.
“I went because the situation in London, as a postgraduate Black art student, was bleak. I was one of two Black artists in our entire programme, and my work was centred around feeling very isolated or othered,” Adeniyi-Jones says. In the US, however, he encountered the works of Bob Thompson, Barkley Hendricks and other Black American figurative painters, discoveries which had a profound impact on his own work. “My favourite painters were Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville,” the artist says, citing two influential white British painters. “I love these two artists, but they neither speak for nor represent me in a way that I felt or feel now, but I was told to understand that they were the benchmark. But now [at Yale] I got a whole new set of references and launch points.”