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By Damiete Braide
Two years after the death of celebrated artist, Yusuf Grillo, the family of the art icon is poised to unveil the GrilloArt Museum on Saturday, August 26, 2023, in Ikeja, Lagos.
The museum, which is in honour of the Grillo, who passed away on August 23, 2021, will house most of his personal collection of the works of other artists and memorabilia of his own life and works.
The family is establishing the Yusuf Grillo art museum to preserve the legacy of their late father; the iconic art collector and custodian, Omooba Yemisi Shyllon, will unveil it.
Mrs. Morayo Anthonio, one of Grillo’s daughters, made the disclosure at a press briefing in Lagos.
According to Mrs. Anthonio, the Yusuf Grillo Museum is part of the family’s efforts to continue their father’s contributions to the development and study of fine arts. It will be opened on August 26 at his Ikeja residence.
Born in 1934 in the Brazilian quarters of Lagos, Grillo was a contemporary Nigerian artist celebrated for his innovative and inventive techniques in the different forms of art he practiced. He was a master sculptor, stained glass artist and most widely recognized as a painter of distinct and uncommon style.
He was the founding president of the Society of Nigerian Artists and actively contributed to FESTAC ’77, along with many other artists of his era. He also served as the director of the Lagos State Council for Arts and Culture in the 1970s.
Grillo was considered one of Nigeria’s outstanding academically trained painters; he emerged to prominence and international recognition in the 1960s and 1970s while exhibiting a large collection of his early works. He made use of his western art training in many of his paintings, combining western art techniques with traditional Yoruba sculpture characteristics. His preference for the colour blue in natural settings and paintings is sometimes similar to the Adire or resist-dye textiles used in Nigeria. He was head of the Department of Art and Printing at Yaba College of Technology, from the mid-1960s till his retirement in 1987.
Grillo had his tertiary training in the arts at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, where he was a member of the Zaria Arts Society, otherwise known as the Zaria Rebels. They were famous for their artistic philosophy known as natural synthesis, which promoted Nigerian national identity through a hybrid form combining indigenous artistic styles with westernised artistic expressions. Subsequently, Grillo studied at other schools in England, Germany and the United States of America. He unified his training in the western representational style focused on Nigeria’s cultural history and artistic imagery.
Mrs. Anthonio said, “During the first anniversary of our father’s passing on last year, we had an art talk, which was a big event for the art world. At the event, I made a statement that we didn’t really know what we had until he was gone. While we all just related to him as daddy, it was when he left us that we realized the impact and work that he actually did, which we took for granted.
“The impact of his life’s work only became known to us after we thought that this could not be the end of this. He did so much on the art scene. Knowing him for who he was, we felt that he would like to continue to give. So, this is still part of his legacy that his work still goes on.
“We have stepped in his shoes to continue to encourage arts, fine art and the study of it. We will continue to use what he left behind to give back to the art world in terms of opening up part of his personal space and turn it a living legacy for him.
“For that we incorporated a company called GrilloArt in 2021 after he passed on. GrilloArt is the holding company for what we now call the Yusuf Grillo Museum. The museum encompasses more than it is in his honour; it has a gallery space, meeting spaces, a library space for research, a gallery space for younger artists to encourage upcoming artists do research. It is going to be launched on August 26, three days after he passed on, as way to mark his second anniversary memorial for him. Future memorials will be something to bring the art world together and make sure that people don’t forget him.”
Talking about the challenges, she said, it was not too much of a challenge, because, even before their father’s demise, there had been talk that he should do a will.
“Since our mother left before him, there was talk, and I had told him to write a will, which he never did. We talked about that at length. We went through various options of what could happen. At the end, he said, it’s your problem, deal with it. I trust that you guys will deal with it. After he left, it was mooted that we separate his house from the quarters, and everybody agreed to it and it wasn’t a challenge.
“Where there is love and when you have interacted in love all through your life, I wonder how siblings who grew up together will be at each other’s throat because your parents passed on. I see my siblings and we interacted much and we have been blessed because our father trained us in love. And we managed our inter-relationships very well and it just continued this way, even after he passed on.
“The museum will showcase his personal collection of his works of other contemporaries that he collected over the years.
“Towards the end of his life, he didn’t work much on his works. We have things that we can show of his works. Though he didn’t have so much of his works in his collection, most of the works that he left are some of the canvas that he didn’t finish before he passed on.
“The ones he kept are the ones we are working very hard to make presentable and we have restored almost all of them to the state that God wants to keep them.
“We want people to know about Grillo’s works and we are passionate about it so that his labour will not be in vain,” she said.
