The Artist Who Draws With the Ancestors: Hector Udoka, conveying the beauty of Uli

Chijioke Mbanefo, Obinwannem News | Arts & Culture | April 22, 2026

Before colonialism arrived with its oil lamps and census registers, Igbo women painted. Not on canvas — on skin, on mud walls, on the bodies of brides and the faces of the newly titled. The art was called uli, and it was not decoration. It was cosmology made visible, a language of lines that spoke what words could not hold. Hector Nnamdi Udoka is a fast-rising modern artist working directly in the tradition of this ancient Igbo draughtsmanship.

He describes the Igbo people as “among the most oratorically endowed in existence,” and says the beauty of thought that transforms into proverbs directly informs the symbolism and form of everything he makes.
What makes Udoka significant is not simply that he is talented — the Igbo world has always produced artists of rare skill.

It is that he is doing something harder: translating a living tradition, not a museum piece. His achievements include the LIMCAF Prize for Best Drawing in 2022 and a second-place finish at the Spanish Embassy Art Prize for Young Nigerians in 2023, while continuing the legacy of Enugu Art School pioneers who broadened the horizons of Igbo visual history.

Uli was once listed as a dying tradition. In Udoka’s hands, and in the hands of a growing cohort of young Igbo artists reclaiming their inheritance, it is doing something more interesting than surviving. It is speaking to audiences in Lagos, Accra, Madrid, and beyond — in a visual language that predates every colonial border drawn across this continent. Ogee Chi ka mma — God’s time is the best.

Date: May 2, 2026
Ubochi Afo Ani
Published by Mazi Ugwu Okechukwu (Director Obinwannem Media)