I went looking before I finished reading
The email landed in our inbox and I barely got past the first paragraph before I was looking the whole thing up. Sample Chief, a platform that has spent years connecting people to African music and the stories around it, has built its first art exhibition, and the starting point is Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti.
The show is called As Loud As Freedom. It is curated by TD Curatorial Fellow abisola oni, and it runs from September 17 to October 4 at 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media and Education in Toronto.
Lagos, drawn by hand
If you grew up with Fela in the house, you know these covers before you know the songs. Lemi Ghariokwu designed most of them, and his work now sits in MoMA's permanent collection. Seven of his pieces are in this show, reprinted on sintra this year as one of one editions: Ikoyi Blindness, Zombie and Motherland from 1976, J.J.D. (Johnny Just Drop!!) from 1977, Free Your Mind from 1984, Beasts of No Nation from 1988, and Why Roam from 2017.
Spend one minute with Ikoyi Blindness and you will understand why the show exists. A blindfolded man in a pale blue suit stumbles forward with a cigarette in his mouth, a "Jesus Saves" badge on his lapel and a business card that stacks every degree his mother could frame. Behind him the city is labelled like a map: Maroko, Ajegunle, Mushin, a NEPA pole, the Kalakuta Republic, a bus marked Charity, and a road sign that reads "No Road, Shalo River Ahead."
Twelve years later, Beasts of No Nation drew Botha, Reagan and Thatcher with horns and fangs while a crowd below carries a placard that says "Human Rights Is Our Property." Lemi was painting headlines, and he was doing it with a brush.
The four artists answering him
Leap of Faith by Jibola Fagbamiye (2025)
What excites me most is that curator abisola oni refused to leave Lemi on the wall alone. Jibola Fagbamiye, a Toronto illustrator nominated for a 2026 Eisner Award for the graphic novel Fela: Music Is the Weapon, brings The Leap, a boy running off a cliff edge toward a woman in flight against a huge pink sun, and The Kiss, a comic panel whose caption box reads "I needed to go home. What I had learned, my people needed to hear."
Ehiko Odeh, born in Surulere, builds collages from archival fragments, and her Sacred Nourishment sets a mother and child inside a frame of woven basket, zebra print and horn. Soji "Shakes" Oyinsan, who works between Toronto and Lagos, paints from his research into Yoruba twin culture, and his paired clay faces Old Soldier and Old Teacher are each subtitled as the other's twin. Chukwudubem Ukaigwe's We'll See puts a trumpet inside a blazing sun and a yellow jar that says Koola Lobitos, the name of Fela's early band, in the corner of a Lagos compound.
What has changed, and what has not
Sample Chief founder Ore Sami says the team "intentionally brought together artists across generations who have been directly and indirectly impacted by his work, and who have been circling around the question of what freedom truly means for the Africans of today."
The press release asks what has changed since Fela's time and what has stayed the same. From where I am sitting in Lagos, the second list is embarrassingly long. NEPA has changed its name more than once and we still plan our evenings around the light. The roads still end at water with very little warning. A man in a nice suit with a Jesus badge is still the most trusted figure in the room, whether or not he can see.
That is also the tension I cannot shake. The show opens in Toronto, where most of Canada's Nigerian community lives and where three of the five artists are based, and it throws its Independence Day party on October 1 more than nine thousand kilometres from the city Lemi painted. I understand why. The diaspora needs these conversations too, and Sample Chief built this with its own community. I just want to see these walls in Lagos next, in front of the people who still live inside Ikoyi Blindness.
If you are in Toronto
The gallery at 918 Bathurst Street is free and open daily from 12 to 5 PM until October 4. Opening night is September 17 from 6 to 9:30 PM, and abisola oni moderates an artist talk on September 19.
There is a ticketed collage workshop with Ehiko Odeh on September 25, a listening lounge on September 26, poetry night on September 27, and the Independence Day Bash with Local Global, Deelo and Ṣewà on October 1. Do Not Push teaches a vinyl DJ workshop on October 3, and a movie night closes things out on October 4.
The exhibition is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the African Studies Centre at the University of Toronto.