A striking new book chronicling how visual artists in Nigeria, Europe and the United States weathered the COVID-19 pandemic has officially launched on Amazon, offering readers an intimate alternative to the statistics and headlines that once defined the crisis.Shades of Hope: Covid Reminiscences Through Art, written by veteran arts writer and longtime THISDAY arts editor Okechukwu Uwaezuoke and published by Nostalgiamedia, went on sale Tuesday, September 8. Spanning 152 pages, the book gathers first-person reflections from artists who found themselves scattered, stranded and searching for meaning when the world shut its doors.
Rather than retelling the familiar chronology of lockdowns, curfews and case counts, Uwaezuoke instead asked a simple question: what was it like to be an artist when everything stopped? The answers, drawn from studios, borrowed rooms and unfamiliar cities, reveal a mosaic of experience rather than a single shared story.
In Manhattan, Nigerian-born artist Tony Nsofor watched New York shed its identity as a relentless metropolis, replaced by empty streets and the constant wail of ambulances. Thousands of miles away in Gdańsk, Poland, Bob-Nosa Uwagboe found his solo exhibition and residency abruptly suspended, leaving him stranded and confronting a feeling of confinement that had unsettled him even before the lockdown began.
Back home in Nigeria, a single WhatsApp message set off something unexpected: Blessing "Bee" Azubike and The Artist Ladder describe how it sparked a 14-day art diary challenge that pulled in artists from Abuja, Lagos and Ogun State, turning isolation into an act of collective creativity.
The book's global reach captures pandemic disruption in its many forms. Chidi Kwubiri made it out of Nigeria for Frankfurt with only hours to spare before borders slammed shut. Jimmy Nwanne's story ran the opposite direction, a planned two-week trip to Nigeria stretched into a long, unexpected homecoming.
Others found themselves caught between geographies and emotions. Emmanuel Eni writes from Germany about art and life in the wake of his Forbes recognition for his "Light Paintings," while Emeka Udemba describes the slow, sobering realisation that a return to normal life was much further away than anyone had hoped.
For several of the artists featured, restriction became an unlikely catalyst. In Belgium, Godfrey Williams-Okorodus turned to beadwork and gardening, using the lockdown to quietly compare his adopted country's experience with Nigeria's. Sam Ovraiti used the enforced pause to rebuild his creative discipline and deepen ties with fellow artists.
In Lafia, artist and lecturer Blaise Gundu Gbaden kept teaching, researching and painting even as the pandemic felt like a more distant threat in his surroundings. And in Naples, Temitayo Ogunbiyi managed to complete a public playground project for an Italian museum entirely through remote collaboration, a small but powerful assertion of movement and hope at a moment when both were in short supply.
What emerges across the book's pages is not a unified narrative but a deliberate refusal of one. Some artists worked with sharpened focus; others found themselves creatively paralysed. Some reached for unfamiliar materials and techniques; others turned inward, toward family and the rhythms of domestic life.
The book's foreword is by Dr Jess Castellote, director of the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art at Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos, who has known Uwaezuoke for more than two decades. Castellote reflects on the patience and curiosity that have defined the author's long engagement with the art world, qualities evident in how carefully these testimonies have been gathered and preserved.
Shades of Hope positions itself less as a record of what happened during the pandemic and more as an archive of what it felt like: the cancelled exhibitions, interrupted journeys, empty gallery halls, improvised routines and unforeseen bursts of creativity that statistics alone could never capture.
For Uwaezuoke, the pandemic becomes a lens for examining both the fragility and the resilience of artistic life. The result is a book that functions simultaneously as a document of individual artists' journeys and a broader meditation on an extraordinary period in recent history.
Shades of Hope: Covid Reminiscences Through Art, published by Nostalgiamedia, is now available in paperback on Amazon.
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