Afrofuturistic Building Bricks

Can black sculptures made out of Lego lead to liberation for Black people around the world? Toronto-based artist Ekow Nimako thinks so, and that has been his guiding principle in making stunning pieces of art, like Kumbisaleh 3020 CE, an Afrofuturistic re-imagining of a medieval city in the ancient kingdom of Ghana.

“I reached into the past to essentially propel us into the future,” Nimako says. The 30-square-foot architectural sculpture, permanently housed at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, was designed using over 100,000 Lego elements to inspire progress, and celebrate Blackness without the backdrop of enslavement, colonization, and violence.

“It’s about dreaming or imagining a reality, and through that imagining of what could be, things become reality. Every system we experience through the expanse of human civilization, it’s been thought up,” the 42-year-old artist says of his effort to use Afrofuturism as a method of Black liberation. “When you think about Afrofuturism, we can think about worlds like [Marvel’s] Wakanda — an African nation that has not been touched by colonialism or enslavement, and is exceedingly technologically advanced — that kind of imagination of what could be is what allows things to be.”

Photography by Samuel Engelking.

And Nimako has experienced imagination becoming reality, firsthand, since he fondly remembers playing with Lego at the age of 4 and wishing he could do it for the rest of his life. With 16 exhibitions and three public artworks under his belt since graduating Canada’s York University with a BFA in 2010, it appears his childhood dream manifested into a career. Nimako’s even got a collaboration with the toy company that sparked his creativity in the works, and his Building Black series will expand in the Fall of 2022, when his next epic world-building exhibition, Journey of 2,000 Ships, debuts at the Dunlop Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan.

See more at ekownimako.com.

This article appeared in Make: Volume 78 in 2021.