Collection: Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu

Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu (1928 - 1996) was born in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. She taught art in British colonial mission schools (1945-50) and won a government scholarship to study in London at the Chelsea School of Art in 1954, earning a teaching diploma at the Institute of Education, University of London, in 1955. That year she became the first woman teacher at NCAST in Zaria. She produced distinctly local scenes of indigeneity through European modes of visual representation. Her attempts to forge a new national identity through her practice in the years leading up to Nigeria's independance (1955-9) greatly influenced a generation of NCAST students, who went on to form the Zaria Art Society, though she felt resistance from her white colleagues, 'who felt she was not supposed to be there'. She later accepted a lectureship at the University of Ibadan. She resumed teaching after 1966, having raised four children. Ugbodaga-Ngu participated in significant exhibitions, including the Independance Exhibition in Lagos (1960), Contemporary Art in Nigeria (1968) and FESTAC (1977), for which she worked as state advisor. In 1958 she became the first female Nigerian artist to have a solo exhibition in London, at the Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery.