Interview with Nigerian Photographer Isabella Agbaje
Join us as we sit with eclectic artist Isabella Agbaje! She shares with us some of the meaning behind her vibrant use of colors, and how her time in San Francisco has helped shaped her art. We discuss her view on women's rights as well as what her life is like traveling across Africa.
Isabella Agbaje is a self-taught Conceptual Visual Artist and Photographer. In 2016 she moved to Lagos and dubbed herself ‘Izzyella’; kindling a love for visual storytelling. The artist uses her medium as a social commentary tool that highlights unique instances of Love in her immediate environment. She finds in her society that more people work hard to showcase and fascinate without than within. Her current body of work is influenced by research on Nigeria’s Modernist era, the artwork and documentary films produced Pre-Independence that’s all but lost to her generation and younger.
Most of all, she aims for her work to embody the universal language of colour that appeals to the heart and connects with the soul. Her journey through the mental grey fog that encapsulates so easily also informed her choice process to work with Colour. She obtained a formal education at Northeastern University, Boston and is currently managing Seneca Media Nigeria LTD, a full-service media firm.
Purchase prints of her work below. All funds go to Isabella as well as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Stand to End Rape. They catalyze innovative programs, policies, and public engagement efforts and create transformative policy-wide behavioural and systemic changes in the lives of women and girls in Nigeria.
Exhibitions Solo
‘Iridescentes’ at Alliance Française de Lagos. May 2018 Group
Photography Competition, Camera Category Winner. Royal Over- Seas League. London, United Kingdom. December 2019.
In Conversation; Visualisations of Black Masculinity. African American Museum in Philadelphia. MFON Women Photographers of the Diaspora. October 2019.
Rated Top 70 Nigerian photographers by 35Awards. August 2019.
LagosPhoto Festival, Prism Programme, The Conceptual Shift. October 2018.
Afrikultur, Freedom Park, Lagos. April 2017.
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