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

SAN FRANCISCO, March 23, 2026 — Nigerian artist Nengi Omuku’s first solo US exhibition, Nengi Omuku: The Gathering, will open at the de Young museum on June 27, 2026. 

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. 

About the Artist 

Nengi Omuku has earned numerous scholarships and awards, including the British Council CHOGM art award presented by HM Queen Elizabeth II. Commissions include a 2018 mural in an intensive care psychiatric ward at the Maudsley Hospital, London, from the Arts Council England. In 2021, she received a World Trade Organization Residency organized by African Art Foundation in Geneva. In 2025, she was selected to join the inaugural Artist Council of the Museum of West African Art, Benin City in 2025.

The artist has previously staged solo institutional exhibitions at Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, UK, and Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2023-24). She has participated in group exhibitions at the ICA San Francisco (2024), Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria (2024), DAK'ART, Biennale of Contemporary African Art, Dakar, Senegal (2024), Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024), Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2023-24), Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO (2023), and Bangkok Art Biennale (2022-23). In 2023, she was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Residency in Italy (2024) to follow a 2022-23 residency at Black Rock Senegal. Omuku's work can be found in international public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Newark Museum of Art, the ICA Miami, the HSBC Art Collection, and the Loewe Art Collection, among others. Omuku's work can be found in international public and private collections including the UK Government Collection, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Newark

Museum of Art, the ICA Miami, the Norton Museum of Art, the HSBC Art Collection, and the Loewe Art Collection among others. 

Film

To coincide with the opening of the exhibition, the Museums will premiere a film centering Omuku’s artistic practice and journey as an artist. The film is part of FAMSF Presents, a video series highlighting the work of artists shown at the de Young and Legion of Honor museums, including Leilah Babirye, Patrick Kelly, and Wangechi Mutu.

Exhibition Organization

This exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. 

About the Fine Arts Museums’ African Art Program and African Art Collection

Launched in 2022 by Natasha Becker, the inaugural curator of African art, the Museums’ African art program highlights contemporary artists from across the continent whose work draws from, reinterprets, and expands African artistic and cultural histories. Since its inception, the program has presented exhibitions by South African artist Lhola Amira and sculptures by Ugandan artist Leilah Babirye, establishing a dynamic platform for artists whose practices speak to both historical lineages and present-day concerns.

The program places contemporary artists in dialogue with the Museums’ collection of historical African Art. This collection began with artworks exhibited at the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and grew steadily through museum purchases and gifts from Bay Area art collectors. Today it comprises approximately 300 world-class artworks, largely from the 19th through the mid-20th centuries—a period shaped by profound political, economic, and religious change as societies across Africa confronted colonialism and globalism.

The collection ranges from an ancient Dogon wood figure from 11th-to-12th-century Mali, to the work of renowned contemporary artist El Anatsui, a sculptor from Ghana whose monumental installations transform everyday materials into shimmering forms. Outstanding examples of masks and figural sculptures from art-producing cultures in West and Central Africa anchor the de Young’s Arts of Africa galleries offering visitors a rich encounter with the depth and innovation of artistic expression from Africa.

About the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco oversee the de Young museum, located in Golden Gate Park, and the Legion of Honor, in Lincoln Park. It is the largest public arts institution in San Francisco, and one of the most visited arts institutions in the United States.

The de Young originated from the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition. The present copper-clad landmark building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, opened in October 2005. Reflecting an active conversation among cultures, perspectives, and time periods, the collections on view include American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 17th to the 21st centuries; arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; costume and textile arts; and international modern and contemporary art.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco respectfully acknowledge the Ramaytush Ohlone, the original inhabitants of what is now the San Francisco Peninsula, and acknowledge that the greater Bay Area is the ancestral territory of the Miwok, Yokuts, Patwin, and other Ohlone. Indigenous communities have lived in and moved through this place over hundreds of generations, and Indigenous peoples from many nations make their home in this region today. Please join us in recognizing and honoring their ancestors, descendants, elders, and their communities.

Media contact 

Greta Gordon, Communications Manager, ggordon@famsf.org