Lagos was a vibe! It always is. From the first time we went in 2022, it has captivated us. Art brought us, and we stayed for the culture. Once again, Capital Art collaborated with Soul Traveller Tours to host a curated trip during ART X Lagos 2025. We outline the highlights from our trip from 6 to 9 November 2025, across two blog posts. In case you missed it, you can read Part 1 here.
Lagos Culture – History, Fashion and Food
Other highlights from the trip covered history, fashion, and food.
History – the JK Randle Centre for Yorùbá Culture and History
It has been a treat to visit the JK Randle Centre over the years. It was just a nearly-complete construction site in 2022, whereas we experienced tours in the completed museum since 2024.
Dr John Randle, a prominent Lagosian medical doctor, built a public swimming pool in 1928 in a much-loved recreational area. On completion of the pool and surrounding garden, Dr Randle handed over the facilities to the Lagos Town Council with a maintenance purse to ensure its upkeep. This grand gesture was inspired by the refusal of the British Colonial Office to build a pool for Lagosians to learn how to swim.
What we thought would be a quick one-hour tour ended up being a 2.5-hour journey! It covered the Yoruba creation story, cultural practices and beliefs, including storytelling, authorship, and folklore, contemporary art and fashion, and musical references such as the father of Afrobeats, Fela Kuti. With the gift shop now also open, one could pick up momentos such as fridge magnets, clothing, jewelry, and books. We picked up a book co-authored by Castellote, Director of the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art (YSMA). YSMA was a stop covered in Part 1 of our blog post series.
Fashion
Our fashion stops included The Ladymaker, a boutique which practices sustainability in fashion while making very memorable pieces and was once named as one of the Nigerian designers that author Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie loves. Another fashion stop was Temple Muse, which sells several brands, and also hosts an art exhibition during Lagos Art Week. This year’s presentation was ‘THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS: A Cartography of Self’ by multi-disciplinary artist Myles Igwebuike, in a showcase curated by Avinash D. Wadhwani.
We also had the pleasure of front row seats to one of the GTCO Fashion Weekend fashion shows. Our event featured designers Ituen Basi, The BAM Collective, Sevon Dejana, Mmuso Maxwell, Mowalola, and Priya Alhuwalia.
The GTCO Fashion Weekend also included a fashion expo and masterclasses for attendees.
The experience cemented how Lagos Art Week 2025 has something for everyone! It is not only focused on visual arts, but also provides many other exploits “for the Gram”!
Food
A multitude of restaurants are available to those attending the weekend. A highlight was a new restaurant whose interior made our photos look like they could have been generated by AI.
Special visits
The Lagos Art Week 2025 weekend also included a studio visit, a visit to an art centre, and a visit to the site of an arts society which will open in H1 2026.
Studio visit
On the programme was a studio visit with the artist Samuel Ajobiewe. Ajobiewe is a veteran artist who has fought social and political injustices through his paintbrushes, canvases, and other art mediums he sees fit. Over the last three decades, his practice has become known for thought-provoking artworks that capture universal human experiences while highlighting the unseen aspects of contemporary life.
Ajobiewe covered paintings and sculptures he created between 2018 and 2025, which epitomised his artistic evolution as a social critic. The sculptures are made using a medium and technique he used for his honours project, which earned him the class honours.
The studio visit was generously hosted by an art collector and patron, and the founder of Red Heritage. Red Heritage is a visual art organisation designed to provide developmental support and advisory services to artists, cultural practitioners, and key players in the African art ecosystem at various stages of their careers. It has been operating for 30 years.
Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) Lagos
CCA Lagos is an independent non-profit making visual art organisation. Founded in December 2007 by visionary curator Bisi Silva (1962 – 2019), it provides a platform for the development, presentation, and discussion of contemporary visual art and culture. Two exhibitions were on show at CCA Lagos.
Sea Never Dry is a group exhibition that takes its title from the distinguished photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi’s long-term series, begun in 1982, which sensitively chronicles the rhythms of life at Lagos’s historic Bar Beach. Once a pivotal cultural and social landmark, at once a site of leisure, ritual, political assembly, and national reflection, Bar Beach has been irrevocably altered by the Eko Atlantic reclamation project. Its transformation underscores urgent questions of memory, erasure, and the shifting contours of the city’s urban landscape.
This exhibition, covering the first and second floors of CCA Lagos, is conceived as a multidisciplinary platform for reflection and inquiry. Through the convergence of photography, installation, performance, archival research, and community voices, Sea Never Dry examines the intersections of coastal identity, climate change, urban redevelopment, and collective memory. It invites audiences to engage critically with the legacies of Bar Beach and to consider broader narratives of resilience, displacement, and belonging within Lagos and beyond.
The exhibition features works by Akinbode Akinbiyi, Odun Orimolade, Zaynab Odunsi, Christopher Obuh, Nengi Nelson, and Peter Okotor.
Exhibitions featuring inter-continental collaborations
The second exhibition, titled “Òwú.. Fil. Faden. Thread,” occupies the third floor of the CCALagos building. Both a work of art and a method of research, the exhibition is a tactile approach to history, memory, and resistance. It interlaces cities such as Bregenz, Lagos, St. Gallen, Vienna, and Dakar into a textile fabric that reveals colonial entanglements as well as gestures of resilience. Materials, including linen, cotton, damask, and fine industrial embroidery, bear the traces of trade, violence, and migration.
Anette Baldauf, Milou Gabriel, Sasha Huber, Janine Jembere, Susanna Delali Nuwordu, Abiona Esther Ojo, Jumoke Sanwo, Mariama Sow, and Katharina Weingartner are the participating artists in this creation of a series of quilts and audiovisual-multimedia works.
Mbari Kola
Mbari Kola is a unique and dynamic private members’ society and foundation which draws its membership from Nigeria’s art and culture-enthused community.
The foundation was founded by Ugoma Ebilah, art curator, gallerist, and the dynamic founder of BLOOM Art Lagos, and cultural convenor who is also a collector herself. The former banker also serves on the boards of G.A.S. Foundation and Art School Africa. “At Mbari Kola, people become better, more curious, more civil, and more responsible versions of themselves so that collectively, the creative, economic, and intellectual elite can be agents of developing and elevating culture, community, and country,” she said of her vision for the space and foundation.
Mbari Kola will reside in a beautiful, lovingly and purposefully designed house on a historic street in the heart of Ikoyi, set on two floors. The building site is in progress. In the same way that we have seen the JK Randle centre progress from building site to the wonderful experience we had this year, we cannot wait to return to Mbari Kola once completed.
G.A.S. Foundation – a location for networking during Lagos Art Week 2025
Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation is a Nigerian non-profit founded in 2019 by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA and an esteemed board of Directors. It delivers residencies and public programmes across two sites located in Lagos and Ijebu. The multi-use live/work spaces host multidisciplinary artists, researchers, and curators from all over the world in awarded residencies for up to three months.
Their events always offer an opportunity to engage with a diverse group of people from around the world – artists, curators, patrons, and those looking to learn from all three. The G.A.S Foundation programming ahead of the fair included their Re:assemblages Symposium held on 4 and 5 November 2025. The programme also included a panel discussion titled Catalysing African Collecting Futures. Collecting here is framed as an active, generative practice, one that energises cultural ecosystems, enables sustained creative production, and underpins the institutional infrastructures that allow new African art institutions to thrive.
The aim of the panel was to draw on the journeys of figures such as Femi Akinsanya, whose collection has become a vital reference point for modern and contemporary Nigerian art; Osahon H. Okunbo, whose approach reflects a deep engagement with emerging voices and narratives; and Kayode Adegbola, a lawyer, collector, and cultural entrepreneur whose Adegbola Art Projects platform has supported Nigerian artists, built curatorial and exhibition opportunities, and developed infrastructure for arts education and residencies.
The Museum of West African Art in Benin City
One cannot complete the reflection on Lagos Art Week 2025 without commenting on Benin, most well known for being the site of the advanced 18th-century kingdom, which was looted and razed to the ground by the British Army, and whose Bronzes are in many institutions around the world, including the British Museum, which refuses to return them as an act of restitution.
Located a three-hour drive or a one-hour flight from Lagos, logistics had been arranged for many visits to easily travel to Benin for a preview of the Museum of West African Art, which was scheduled for its opening on 11 November 2025. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, which saddened so many in the art community in Lagos and at large, as many had travelled to or were making their way to Benin in Edo State, and many were looking forward to all the benefits that would accrue to the broader art ecosystem from the institution, such as conservation services.
As a salve to those events, one can celebrate the events organised by Black Muse, the sister Benin-situated location to Lagos-situated Angels & Muse, a project space founded by artist Victor Ehikhamenor. The opening of the Black Muse Sculpture Park, as well as the Black Muse Art Festival running from 8 to 12 November, featured conversations, exhibitions, performances, and other communal experiences.
Lagos Art Week – an experience worth having again and again
Lagos Art Week 2025 was once again jollof rice for the art collector’s soul – at once a comforting and rejuvenating hug that underscored the privilege of being in the whirlpool of creativity and energy that is Lagos.
as always a fascinating resume of art food and fashion, thank you !!!