Susanne Wenger

Private Collection, UK

Wole Soyinka wrote of Austrian-born artist Susanne Wenger, also known by her priestess name Adùnní Olórìṣà, and her writer and scholar husband Ulli Beier, "An assignment roulette in Europe brought them to Nigeria and both promptly 'went native', Susanne not just culturally, but viscerally and spiritually, holding nothing back in herself, and was inducted into the priesthood of the goddess of the Osun river”.

The couple went to live first in Ede, and then in 1960 to Osogbo, now capital of Osun State about 50 miles north-east of Ibadan. They immersed themselves in Yoruba life and became two of its most prolific cultural advocates in the late 1950s and 60s; they rebuilt the Osun Grove, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and founded the Mbari Club, the centre for cultural activity by African writers, artists and musicians, in Ibadan in 1961 and the Mbari Mbayo in Osogbo in 1962.

In 1962 and 1963, the American artist Jacob Lawrence and Guyanese artist Denis Williams carried out two different art workshops in Osogbo; it was these workshops that prepared the ground for Georgina Beier’s all-important workshop of 1964 where the legacy of the Osogbo Art School was entrenched, two of its most famous students being Twins Seven-Seven and his then wife, Nike Davies-Okundaye.