Houston’s Mitochondria Gallery has opened Makers of Legacy, the debut solo exhibition of Nigerian sculptor Ejiro Fenegal, whose work engages both tradition and innovation. Rooted in the sculptural practices of the Urhobo people of Nigeria’s Niger Delta, Fenegal’s work is part of a long lineage that stretches back centuries, but it also speaks urgently to contemporary debates around gender, identity, and cultural continuity.
Courtesy of Mitochondria Gallery
The Urhobo have made lasting contributions to West African art history through their sculpture. For generations, figures in wood, clay, and bronze captured social transitions, cosmological beliefs, and communal memory. Today, these works are held in major collections from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fenegal steps into this conversation by shifting the material language: her medium of choice is bonded marble, which she treats with layered patinas that create a vibrant, contemporary surface.
Courtesy of Mitochondria Gallery
Where her predecessors might have depicted ritual archetypes or ancestral forms, Fenegal places women at the center of her narrative. Her sculptures are monumental busts and torsos that are modeled from live muses. Their names and stories are inseparable from the works themselves. The choice underscores Fenegal’s conviction that “every woman is worthy of being cast in stone.”
The exhibition is organized around women as “makers of legacy” a phrase that encapsulates the endurance of African women whose contributions often go unrecorded yet remain foundational to families and communities. The figures represent a spectrum: the maiden on the cusp of adulthood, the mother balancing care and resilience, the matriarch embodying wisdom and authority. Their textured hairstyles, serene expressions, and quiet monumentality point to a continuity that is at once cultural and personal.
Courtesy of Mitochondria Gallery
What distinguishes Fenegal’s practice is not only the reverence she gives to her subjects, but also how she reframes Urhobo sculptural heritage for the 21st century. By trading traditional materials for bonded marble, she connects her work to the global canon of sculpture, where permanence and monumentality have long been associated with European traditions. In doing so, she asserts an African female presence in a medium historically dominated by other narratives.
The curatorial framing reinforces this position. Bonded marble is presented not just as a medium but as metaphor: strength, resilience, and unity across generations. In an art world where African sculpture is often historicized as “artifact,” Makers of Legacy insists on contemporaneity and relevance. Fenegal’s work belongs as much to conversations about feminist representation and material innovation as it does to African art history.
Courtesy of Mitochondria Gallery
For Houston audiences, the exhibition also resonates with the city’s growing interest in contemporary African art, part of a broader shift in the global art market. Collectors and institutions are increasingly looking beyond established centers, and artists like Fenegal working from both heritage and lived experience are gaining recognition.
In Makers of Legacy, Fenegal’s figures stand as more than portraits. They are propositions about how we remember, who we honor, and what stories endure. Her debut signals the arrival of a sculptor who is not only extending a tradition but reshaping it for the present.
Ejiro Fenegal: Makers of Legacy is on until the 4th of October, 2025 at Mitochondria Gallery
©2025 Ejiro Fenegal, Mitochondria Gallery
Timi Etebu is a gallerist and writer based in Houston, Texas. His interests are in amplifying the voices of artists from Africa and the African Diaspora.
