Education is the Key
Oil · 2017 472 views
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Details
- Category
- Painting
- Medium
- Oil
- Dimensions
- 48 × 43 in
- Year
- 2017
- Edition
- Unique piece
- Framed
- No
- Signed
- Yes
The pride of a mother is to see that her child becomes something useful or important to the society. In this piece, I have a mother carrying a child on her back, while at the same time carrying a calabash on her head. Maybe it’s filled with banana, mango, orange, maize, sweet potato or other things to sell. Women walk the streets all day with this on their head, waiting to be stopped by people who want to buy. All I am trying to show here is how hard women work hawking small things to pay their children’s’ school fees. Trying to make sure the child acquires a good education. It’s not easy at all. The sun is hot, she will sweat, her body will hurt, and at the end of the day she will come home to cook and wash. But her small girl is in school. She is studying hard, and eventually she’ll be able to come back to her mom to take care of her. She will come back to wipe the tears and sweat from her mom’s face. I think education is life. When you give a child education, you give your child life and you also give yourself life.
Many peacebuilding and development professionals work from their offices for governments or NGOs. Emerging artist Luka Chohu (also known as Lucho) works out of his own small compound in the community of Angwan Juma’a, Jos, Nigeria. This is a place where people “hustle” from morning till night to provide for their families – a place where art is generally not encouraged as a viable career path. To be sure, this artist does his fair share of hustling. But in between, he finds time to stretch old sheets over hand-made wooden frames to engage in his own form of peacebuilding and development work. From his small studio, Lucho fuses his artistic talent with his passion for social justice, to communicate the joys and challenges of everyday life in Nigeria; promote peaceful coexistence; and develop the capacities of those around him. His interest in art began in secondary school: “I always had a story to tell. But because I was not good with words or numbers, there was no way for me to tell it.” He therefore began using paint to express his own experiences and feelings. Following secondary school, Lucho moved to the capital to understudy Abuja-based artist, Kelvin Ubani. He then began using his new skills to move his art into broader themes of social justice, inter-identity peacebuilding and the beauty of Nigerian cultures. The purpose of Lucho’s work is twofold. First, using various media, his own art beautifully and honestly presents the paradoxes, joys and challenges of everyday life in Nigeria. It acts as means for himself and others to step back from the daily “hustle,” make sense of what is, and imagine what could be. In the end, what is produced are pieces with both aesthetic value and the ability to communicate such realities to both local and international audiences. Second, Lucho dreams of also using his talent to increase the creative and communicative capacities of others, particularly children in Jos who cannot access proper education, either because of displacement or poverty. Through volunteer work with local NGOs and schools, he has begun gaining experience in this area creating programs for internally displaced and local children learn how to use art to express and value themselves. Truly, Lucho lives as an artist, a development worker, and a peacebuilder.
