Demas Nwoko Will Receive the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement

Last week, the Venice Biennale’s board of directors selected Demas Nwoko to receive the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement for his work over the last 70 years. The Nigerian artist, designer, and architect will be honored during an awards ceremony marking the opening of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale on May 20.

Nwoko was nominated by Lesley Lokko, an architecture professor, founder of the African Futures Institute in Accra, Ghana, and the curator of this year’s installation entitled The Laboratory of the Future. “One of the central themes of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition is an approach to architecture as an ‘expanded’ field of endeavors, encompassing both the material and immaterial worlds; a space in which ideas are as important as artifacts, particularly in the service of what is yet to come,” Lokko said in a press release on the Venice Biennale website. “With all of its emphasis on the future, however, it seems entirely fitting that the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement should be awarded to someone whose material works span the past 70 years, but whose immaterial legacy—approach, ideas, ethos—is still in the process of being evaluated, understood and celebrated.”

Nwoko’s story begins in 1935 when he was born in Idumuje-Ugboko, a town in southern Nigeria. During his secondary school years, he garnered an appreciation for painting, drawing, and carving,which lead him to apply for the architecture program at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology in Zaria. However, after realizing the program focused on technical, architectural drawings over creativity and imagination, he decided to study fine art.

While a student in 1958 he became a founding member of the Zaria Art Society, a collective of five members—including Bruce Onobrakpeya, Uche Okeke, Simon Okeke, and Yusuf Grillo—interested in mixing modern and African aesthetics that illustrated the ideologies of national and continental political independence movements growing in the 1940s and 1950s.

“Demas Nwoko is everything all at once: an architect, sculptor, designer, writer, set designer, critic, and historian,” Lokko said in the press release. “When pushed, he refers to himself as an ‘artist-designer’, which speaks both to the polyglot nature of his talents and oeuvres, and to the rather narrow interpretation of the word ‘architect’ that has arguably kept his name out of the annals.”

Nwoko’s building projects in Nigeria capture cultural dogma centered around sustainability, resourcefulness, and authenticity. In 1977, architecture critic Noel Moffett commented on Nwoko’s commission to build the Dominican Institute in Ibadan, Nigeria, writing: “Here, under a tropical sun, architecture and sculpture combine in a way which only Gaudí perhaps, among architects, has been able to do so convincingly.”

Along with receiving the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement, Nwoko will show some of his material works in the Stirling Pavilion during the Biennale.

Looking for more Venice Biennale news? See past coverage here.