For the first time, Nengi Omuku’s contemporary paintings will be presented alongside the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s historical African art collection, revealing deep cultural and material continuities across generations.
The exhibition includes four monumental new paintings rendered on handwoven sanyan, a textile that deepens the historical and cultural resonance of Omuku’s work.
Nengi Omuku: The Gathering
de Young museum
June 27, 2026–May 14, 2028
The Gathering brings together paintings that imagine new worlds shaped by beauty, community, and resilience amid social challenges. Omuku’s paintings unfold in lush, otherworldly landscapes—celestial skies, flowering fields, and botanical bounty. This botanical sensibility is deeply personal, shaped by her mother’s horticultural work and her own experience as a florist, and it animates the imaginative worlds she creates. Omuku’s figures gather in fields, beneath trees, and along the water’s edge—places where nature becomes a witness to human experience. Drawing on the language of botanical illustration, she treats nature as a gathering place for healing, kinship, and renewal. Working on handwoven sanyan cloth, a historic Yoruba textile once made of silk and cotton, Omuku revives a material tradition tied to memory, ceremony, and cultural knowledge.
Presented in the de Young museum’s Arts of Africa galleries, eight new and recent paintings by Omuku will appear in dialogue with sculptures and textile works from the historical collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the “Museums”). Seen together, the historical and contemporary works show how imagination and resilience have long served as responses to disruption, sustained by the creative and communal practices of African and diasporic life.
At the center of the exhibition is The Gathering, a painting that distills her approach: bodies held in quiet relation, a landscape that gathers rather than surrounds, and a sense of care that arises through closeness. Within these environments, figures hover between dream and memory, as Omuku traces the emotional terrain of young people navigating the challenges of contemporary urban life in Lagos.
“Omuku’s paintings are deeply political, not because they depict crisis, but because they insist on possibility,” shared Natasha Becker, Curator of African Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “In dialogue with the historical collection, her work shows how African artists have long harnessed imagination as a way to survive rupture and to dream beyond it.”
Sanyan, a Yoruba textile once used for ceremonial attire, has declined in production due to deforestation, overharvesting, and the rise of synthetic substitutes. By sourcing vintage cloth and collaborating with contemporary weavers, Omuku revives this enduring yet vulnerable tradition. On her canvases, sanyan becomes a living archive of resistance and cultural continuity. Its presence in the de Young’s Arts of Africa galleries echoes the carved wood, cast metal, and woven fiber of the historical works nearby—materials chosen not only for their physical properties but also for their spiritual and symbolic resonance.
The Gathering deepens this conversation, echoing artworks shaped by ancestry, nature, and community. Through material and imagery, Omuku’s paintings trace how people stay connected to one another, to the land, and to the stories that guide generations. This gathering of artworks opens a conversation across time, offering new ways of seeing and being together.
