Marcia Kure (b. 1970, Kano, Nigeria) studied at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and currently lives in Princeton, US. As a prominent member of the University of Nigeria-based Nsukka School, known for its combination of lyrical simplicity and socio-political vision, her drawings and photomontage imagine alternative worlds and can be seen as a critical response to the postcolonial existential condition.
Through appropriation and reconfiguration of normative fashion aesthetic, classic juvenile literature, African masking forms, and children's toys, she produces hybrid, darkly striking images and objects that insinuate postmodern loss of certainties and postcolonial destabilisation and fragmentation of identities. Her work suggests new orders might emerge from our complex encounters with the present. Her work can be hopeful and despairing at the same time, reassuring yet haunting, beautiful and terrifying.
Kure's work has strong links to Uli art - the Nigerian art form with a graphic-intensive style based on sinuous linear forms. She often uses traditional African pigments such as kolanut and coffee. Her work is connected to the African experience; the experience of expatriation, and the relationship of distance and the idea of 'home' are, for her, as much a part of the African experience as that of the artist working on the African continent.
Marcia Kure was commissioned in 2021 to create a large scale ephemeral wall drawing in the entry space of the Menil Drawing Institute. In 2019 she was Visiting Professor at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm and held an artist residency at the Nordic Art Association. She exhibited in the Rabat Biennale Morocco and Pushing paper, Contemporary Drawing from 1970 until now, British Museum, London and tour, both in 2019. In 2014 she was Artist-in-Residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Her work is in many major collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; British Museum, London; Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.