Fatimah Tuggar facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Fatimah Tuggar
Born	1967 Kaduna, Nigeria
Nationality	Nigerian / American
Education	Whitney Museum of American Art ISP Program Yale University Kansas City Art Institute
Known for	Visual art, installation art, Web-based Interactive Media, Sculpture
Awards	2019 Guggenheim Fine Arts Fellow

Fatimah Tuggar (born in 1967) is an artist from Nigeria who now lives in the United States. She creates art that mixes different ideas and styles. Tuggar uses collage and digital tools to make art that looks closely at common stories about gender, race, and technology. She is currently a professor at the University of Florida. She teaches about how artificial intelligence (AI) is used in art and how it relates to fairness around the world.

Early Life and Art Training

Fatimah Tuggar was born in Kaduna, Nigeria, in 1967. She studied art in different places. First, she went to the Blackheath School of Art in London, England. Later, she earned a special art degree (BFA) from the Kansas City Art Institute in the United States in 1992.

She continued her studies at Yale University, getting a master's degree (MFA) in sculpture in 1995. From 1995 to 1996, she also did a special study program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Before all this, she attended schools in Nigeria and England.

Artistic Career and Key Works

Fatimah Tuggar creates many types of art. She makes pictures, objects, and even art you can interact with online. Her works often show scenes from African and Western daily life side-by-side. This helps people think about how things are made and how ideas about gender, belonging, and progress are formed.

Materials and Art Themes

Tuggar gets ideas from early collage artists like Hannah Hoch. She uses collage to question who has power in visual messages. She takes her own photos and finds pictures from Western ads, magazines, and old videos.

She then digitally combines these images. This helps to show what might be missing from common ideas about gender, race, where people live, home tasks, technology, and global business. Her art also brings African identities to the center.

Tuggar uses new technologies in her art. She uses them both as tools and as a way to question Western ideas of steady progress. Her art objects often combine two or more items. For example, she might mix objects from West Africa with similar Western items. This helps her talk about electricity, tools, and how technology and cultures affect each other.

Her computer and video collages also mix her own videos and photos with found materials. Tuggar believes that meaning comes from putting these different things together. This helps us explore how media affects our daily lives. Overall, her art challenges how we usually see things. It makes us think differently about race, gender, and social class. Her work shows her many different identities and challenges the idea that Africa is all the same.

Digital Photomontages

Fatimah Tuggar started making digital photomontages in 1995. Her early works looked at how media showed technology and women's work in Nigeria. For example, Spinner and the Spindle (1995) and Working Woman (1997) are early computer montages.

In these, she digitally mixes images of Western technology with pictures of rural Nigerian women. This challenges the simple idea that modern Africa is separate from Western technology and progress. Tuggar's use of collage in works like Working Woman shows how complicated it is for people to represent themselves as digital information spreads.

Some of Tuggar's early photomontages were featured in a special magazine edition in 2002. This was to discuss the rise of Afrofuturism, a cultural movement that combines African culture with technology.

Later works like Lady and the Maid (2000) and Bedroom (2001) rethink how Black women and home technologies are shown. They add African stories and symbols into images of White homes from the mid-1900s. Tuggar's montages question power differences in race, gender, and technology.

Her recent photomontage, Home's Horizons (2019), is a two-part artwork. One part shows a traditional adobe home with a thatched roof. The other part mirrors a modern two-story house with a white fence. This work continues to explore technology and home spaces. It looks at places where cultures and places meet, seeing them as both complex and full of possibilities.

Video Art and Sculptures

Tuggar also uses her collage ideas in video installations. Her work Fusion Cuisine (2000) mixes old American ads from the Cold War era. These ads showed home technologies for white middle-class women. She combines them with videos she took of African women in Nigeria.

Fusion Cuisine constantly switches between these old films and images of daily life and work in Nigeria. This work looks at how technology is shown in media. It helps us rethink old ideas about progress and imagine new futures. Her art talks about important topics like culture, technology, and what happens after colonialism. Tuggar doesn't tell people what to think. Instead, she helps us see cultural details that go beyond simple comparisons.

Tuggar's sound sculptures also combine different ideas and technology. Her 1996 sculpture, Turntable, uses discs made from raffia instead of vinyl records. This refers to how the gramophone influenced local languages. For example, in Hausa, a raffia disc is called fai-fai, and a vinyl record is fai-fain gramophone.

Turntable was lost in 2002, so Tuggar remade it in 2010 as Fai-Fain Gramophone. This work honors handmade tools used in homes and music. It uses fai-fai discs woven by women in Nigeria. The woven discs spin like a turntable, and a hidden recording of Nigerian musician Barmani Chogo plays from inside.

Other sound sculptures by Tuggar include Broom (1996) and The Talking Urinal (1992). These works question the purpose and meaning of everyday objects, similar to the art movements Surrealism and Dada.

Interactive Digital Art

In her computer and video collages, Tuggar brings together images that explore cultural details. She also looks at the different ways people relate to power structures. In her online interactive works, people can create their own collages. They can choose animated parts and backgrounds. This lets them build or change stories that are not always in a straight line.

Changing Space (2002) was an online art show by Tuggar. It allowed people to interact in a virtual space. This work questioned who decides what is shown and how modern African art is presented in galleries.

Her interactive animated collage, "Transient Transfer", lets people make collages from scenes in different cities. In her 2006 web project, Triad Raid, Tuggar invites the viewer to make choices. These choices, or lack of choices, make elements move and create a changing collage. This collage is made from characters, landscapes, and actions. This encourages people to create temporary stories that can be built or changed based on their choices.

Tuggar continues to explore technology, work, and global business. Her recent works use Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). These include Desired Dwellings (2009) and Deep Blue Wells (2019). Deep Blue Wells looks at the history of indigo dyeing in Kano, Nigeria. It also considers how global business affects this traditional work.

Exhibitions and Shows

Fatimah Tuggar's art has been shown in many important places. Her work has been part of group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She has also shown her art at big international art events called biennials. These include the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2005 and the Bamako Biennial in Mali in 2003. Her work will also be part of the 2023 Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates.

Other places where her art has been shown include:

• 2019 Fatimah Tuggar: Home's Horizons, The Davis Museum at Wellesley College
• 2019 Charlotte Street Awards Exhibition, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
• 2019 Knowledge, The Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
• 2017, 2018 Flow of Forms/Forms of Flow, Museum am Rothenbaum, Hamburg, Germany
• 2015 Appropriation Art: Finding Meaning in Found-Image Collage The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts, Highlands, North Carolina
• 2012 Fatimah Tuggar, Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
• 2012, 2011, 2010 The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University
• 2012 Harlem Postcards, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, NY
• 2011 Dream Team, Works from 1995-2011, GreenHill Center for North Carolina Art, Greensboro, North Carolina
• 2009 Tell Me Again: A Concise Retrospective, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC
• 2009 Desired Dwellings: Project for an Immersive Virtual Environment, Duke Immersive Virtual Environment, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
• 2002 Changing Space, Art Production Fund, New York, New York
• 2002 Tempo, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
• 2002 Africaine: Candice Breitz, Wangechi Mutu, Tracey Rose, and Fatimah Tuggar, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York
• 2000 Poetics and Power Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
• 2000 Crossing the Line Queens Museum of Art
• 2000 Tell Me Again, The Kitchen, New York, New York
• 2000 Fusion Cuisine, The Kitchen, New York, New York
• 1999 The Passion and the Wave 6th International Istanbul Biennial
• 1999 Beyond Technology: Working in Brooklyn Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York