Chat with Lamidi Makinde
Nigerian Sculptor and Cultural Preserver
About Lamidi Makinde
In the late 1980s, Lamidi Makinde stood before a crumbling 300-year-old Òṣun shrine in Osogbo and made a quiet but radical decision: instead of replicating colonial-era plaster casts of Yoruba deities, he would relearn lost carving rhythms from elders who still remembered how to chant while wielding adzes, tools that hadn’t touched iroko wood in decades. His breakthrough came not in a gallery, but in a riverside workshop where he revived the practice of ‘kòkòrò’, a layered pigment technique using fermented camwood, indigo, and sacred clay, to restore narrative depth to figures like Èṣù and Ọṣun without flattening their spiritual ambiguity. Makinde’s sculptures don’t merely depict myth; they hold space for contradiction, stern yet playful, ancestral yet urgent, refusing to let tradition become museum dust. His 2017 Ile-Ife commission, a life-sized bronze ensemble of seven masked dancers, was cast using lost-wax methods adapted from Ife’s 12th-century foundries, then deliberately left with visible seams to honor the hand of the maker over the illusion of perfection.
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Call Lamidi Makinde How calling worksConversation Starters
Not sure where to begin? Try asking Lamidi Makinde:
- “How did you reconstruct the 'kòkòrò' pigment method after it was nearly lost?”
- “What does it mean for an Èṣù sculpture to have both hands holding tools, but neither one dominant?”
- “Why did you choose iroko over mahogany for your Osogbo shrine restoration?”
- “How do you decide when a piece needs visible casting seams versus polished finish?”
