Iké Udé

The series was exhibited in The Global Africa Project at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York (2010), and in Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (2013). Udé's series was also exhibited at the Leila Heller Gallery in Chelsea, New York. Entitled Style and Sympathies, this exhibit presented a selection of his self-portraits from the series.

Udé is the author of Style File: The World's Most Elegantly Dressed, published by Harper Collins in 2008. The volume profiles 55 influential arbiters of style. Style File features writings and contributions from Valerie Steel, director and chief curator at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology (F. I. T.), and Harold Koda, the former curator-in-charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The publication provides information on all of the 55 women and men profiled, including John Galliano, Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, Diane von Furstenberg, Dita Von Teese, and Christian Louboutin.

In 1995 Udé created aRUDE magazine, named in homage to the Jamaican rude boys of 1960s London. The magazine is similar to Interview and features conversations with artists, photographers, and designers as well as editorials on fashion, beauty and style. While the magazine began as a print publication, it has been published solely online since 2009.

Udé began his Cover Girls series in 1994 which established his place in the contemporary scene. Each photograph imitates the cover of a popular fashion or lifestyle magazines, in which the artist himself is featured as the model. The photographs were consciously stylized, posed, photographed and then paired with type matching that of the respected magazine. At first glance, each photograph appears to be an authentic magazine cover. Udé used the magazine cover as a stage to critique the fetishism of the upper class white model and the effects of popular culture on today's consumerist society. He also used the series to comment on issues such as the absence of blackness in fashion, racial stereotyping, and the misrepresentation of people of color. The series was exhibited in 1994 in the New York City gallery Exit Art.

As an adolescent, Udé attended the Government Secondary School, a British boarding school in Afikpo Nigeria. He was a habitué of London before he moved to New York in 1981 to study Media Communications at Hunter College, CUNY. He began his art career in the late 1980s with abstract painting and drawing. Since the 1990s, photography has been his primary medium.

Iké Udé (born 1964) is a Nigerian-American photographer, performance artist, author and publisher based in New York City, United States.

Udé was born in 1964 in Makurdi, Nigeria where he was raised. The eldest son of a wealthy family, he was exposed to photography and portraiture at an early age by dressing up for biweekly family portraits.