On Thursday, Sept. 25 from 2–4 p.m., you’re invited to a fashion show in the Studio and Design Center lobby — free and open to the public! This special event is the culmination of a weeklong resist-dyeing workshop led by visiting artist Dr. Peju Layiwola, internationally recognized artist, scholar, and curator, focused on the Yoruba textile tradition àdìrẹ, a centuries-old resist-dye practice from southwest Nigeria. Watch student-designed textiles walk the runway alongside new lines by Dr. Layiwola and designer Edward Osei, and experience firsthand how the School of Art brings global artists to Arkansas to work directly with student art scholars to forge lasting professional relationships. 

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About Dr. Peju Layiwola

Dr. Peju Layiwola, Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Lagos and Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Stanley Museum of Art, University of Iowa, has built a distinguished career as an artist, art historian, curator, and fashion designer. A strong cultural advocate, she has championed African artistic traditions across her creative, scholarly, and curatorial practices; and, in her latest bodies of work, alongside her related scholarship and educational initiatives, she has creatively re-engaged and re-imagined longstanding textile traditions, particularly the Yoruba resist-dye tradition from southwest Nigeria, known as àdìrẹ. 

Dr. Layiwola has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, grants, and fellowships, including the British Council SSA Cultural Exchange Programme Grant, 2022;  the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence Research Grant, University of Bayreuth, Germany, 2020-2021; the Lagos Studies Association Distinguished Scholar's Award, 2021; the Ambassador of Goodwill Award, State of Arkansas, 2020; the Tyson Scholar Fellowship, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 2019; the Terra Foundation for American Art Grant, 2018, the US Lagos Consulate Exchange Grant, 2017; and the Distinguished Researcher's Award, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, 2007. She is also an alumnus of the CAA-Getty International Program, participating in 2013, 2018, 2017 and 2020.  

She is the founder of Wy Art Foundation, a nonprofit foundation, which provides art education to women and children from underserved communities (1994), and Master Art Classes, offering a virtual platform for arts education (2020). She has had several artist residencies, including at the University of Bayreuth, Germany in 2022, Rautenstrauch Joest Museum, Germany in 2020; Arts of Africa and the Global South Research Programme at Rhodes University, South Africa in 2018, and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany in 2017. She has co-curated important exhibitions, such as ‘Resist! The Art of Resistance (2020-2022) and I Miss You (2022), both at the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum in Koln, Germany; and she has had several solo exhibitions, such as Benin1897.com: Art and the Restitution Question, 2010, Whose Centenary?, 2014, Return 2018, and Indigo Reimagined, 2019.