Daughters of Seclusion

Imo Nse Imeh is Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at Westfield State University. He received his doctorate in Art History from Yale University, where he studied the art and aesthetics of the African Diaspora. He is a practicing artist as well as a researcher, and although he is American-born, Imeh’s Ibibio heritage – his parents hail from Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria – has become a central point of reference and contemplation in both his art and scholarship. Presently, he is developing a series of paintings that are the visual embodiment of his research.

«Imo Nse Imeh comes from blooded stock. His mother is an Ibibio. He is an Ibibio. With double-barrel authenticity he hits some of the most important aesthetic expressions of the women of Ibibioland who live in the southeast of Nigeria. His eye is sharp and discerning and his command of the sources, both vocal and literary, is nonpareil. This book is destined to become a classic of our field starting with the first page that you turn. An unbelievably rich achievement.» (Robert Farris Thompson, Author of ‘Tango: The Art History of Love’)«Imo Nse Imeh has written a most insightful examination of a women’s initiation procedure in Nigeria from a perspective unlike any other – his own people, his own family, and the initiate herself. The ritual, among the Ibibio people, has long been misunderstood. Imeh’s lucid writing gives us an intimate look into attitudes about the body and its maturity as a personally crafted process of art.» (Frederick John Lamp, Curator of African Art, Yale University Art Gallery; Author of ‘See the Music, Hear the Dance: Rethinking African Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art’)