Peju Layiwola

Layiwola received a BA (Metal Design) from University of Benin in 1988, and an MA and PhD(Visual Arts) from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria in 2004. She was nominated partner for the US State Department smARTpower project initiative by the US Secretary of State in 2012. Her works comprising installation and prints have been exhibited in Nigeria and outside the continent. She is the founder of the Women and Youth Art Foundation, an organisation committed to empowering women, young girls and youth through the arts. She has also served on art juries. Layiwola, who initially began working with metal, now explores a broad range of media that engage with history, memory and cultural expropriation.

Born Adepeju Olowu, Layiwola is the daughter of Babatunde Olatokunbo Olowu and Princess Elizabeth Olowu (née Akenzua). Her paternal grandfather was a business magnate who established the first cinema and printing press in Benin and the Delta region in the old Midwestern state. Her maternal granddfather, meanwhile, was Oba Akenzua II, king of Benin, who reigned from 1933 to 1978. She is also a cousin to DJ P Tee Money (born Thompson Iyamu).

In her most ambitious solo exhibition, Benin1897.com:Art and the Restitution Question (2010), Layiwola's return to the notorious British Expedition of 1897 and the plundering of prized cultural artifacts looted from the bedchamber of her forebears brings together her personal and communal history. Her other collaborative public project, Whose Centenary? (2014) is also informed by history and the archives. She gave a talk at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, and one at the CAA-Getty International Program in 2018 on her work.

Layiwola has led public advocacy for the return of art works stolen from Benin during the Punitive Expedition of 1897.