The life and music of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian performer, composer and political activist, has come to the stage in Fela! The show is set to the infectious Afrobeat music he pioneered — a mix of jazz, highlife, funk and traditional West African chants and rhythms.
Most of Fela's Album Art where design by Lemi Ghariokwu, Lemi Ghariokwu is a Nigerian artist and designer who is most renowned for providing many of the original cover images for the recordings of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti.[1]
His work involves a variety of styles, often using vibrant colours and individuated typefaces of his own design.
More than 2,000 album covers have been designed by Lemi, including covers for Bob Marley, E. T. Mensah, Osita Osadebe, Gilles Peterson and Antibalas.
Many of Ghariokwu's cover images echo and sometimes comment on the work and politics of the recordings that they accompany, serving a consciously integrated metatextual function.
Ghariokwu's approach to his work with Kuti involved listening to and digesting the music and then expressing his reaction in his paintings, design and comments which provide a high level of detail on the many album covers he delivered.[citation needed]
Lemi's relationship with Fela Kuti was very cordial. He gave Lemi total freedom with his work and thoughts to the level that he just did as he pleased, albeit responsibly, with how and what he wanted to express. Lemi had the rare previlege of putting his photograph and comments on some of the covers and was treated like a son, friend, adviser and comrade by the Afrobeat legend.
Ghariokwu's work has attracted much attention in the West and is the subject of various retrospective exhibitions.[2] His painting Anoda Sistem, created in 2002, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.[3]
Some of Ghariokwu's archive is now in the possession of Punch Records whose CEO Ammo Talwar has invited the academic community to make sense of a utilise this material in productive.
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