PROGRAMS

• The Mbanefo Foundation supports a wide range of educational and cultural programs. It fosters scholarly engagements with modern and contemporary African art by providing universities with gifts/funds to support institutional initiatives, and providing researchers of African art and culture with funding opportunities through grants and scholarship awards. It also uses its art collection to support educational initiatives by making it available for use as an educational tool for K-12 outreach programs, including college level instructional projects and museum-oriented art exhibitions. The Mbanefo Foundation promotes awareness of new media initiatives through its support for conferences and symposia on Nollywood—the Nigerian Film Industry, a non-oil sector grassroots initiative that has grown to become the one of the largest film industries in the world.
  
  
• The Mbanefo Foundation is currently supporting research in African art history through a major gift of funds to the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California Santa Barbara. The Foundation’s $100,000 gift supports a lecture series, and provides total funding for a major international symposium on modern and contemporary African art scheduled for May 2007 (see “grants and awards”). It also supports research initiatives for the African Studies Research Focus Group, to attract top international scholars and lecturers on African art and culture to UCSB.
  
  
• The Mbanefo Foundation supports art exhibition projects and negotiates lending agreements with museums for the use of its artworks. It also supports an outreach program to aid younger contemporary Nigerian artists. The Foundation stresses research and education above all and expects in due time to seriously assist programs for the documentation and management of archives of significant publications on modern Nigerian art.

PROGRAM MANAGEMENT

• The Mbanefo Foundation’s art, cultural and educational programs are managed by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie (Ph.D. Northwestern University), professor of Art History at the University of California Santa Barbara. Dr. Ogbechie has extensive scholarly expertise in Classical, Modern, and Contemporary African and African Diaspora arts, and Visual Culture. His research evaluates colonial and postcolonial conventions of representation in African and African Diaspora art and visual culture. His book, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist is forthcoming from the University of Rochester Press. His articles and reviews have appeared in African Arts, Arts Journal, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Revue Noire, Ijele, Farafina, and several important art history anthologies. He is founder of the Aachron Knowledge Systems Initiative (www.aachron.org), through which he mediates the emergence of specific Africa-oriented scholarly and cultural initiatives in the global knowledge economy. He is founder and editorial director of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, and serves on the editorial board of Nka, African Arts and Ijele. He is a curatorial adviser to the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and also consults for major museums and cultural institutions worldwide. Dr. Ogbechie brings two decades of experience in academic scholarship and knowledge management to his position and has worked with various cultural development programs in Africa and the USA. He is a respected art historian and African cultural interpreter with important contributions to scholarly interpretations of African art and culture in the American educational system.