Moyo Ogundipe was born in a small town in Nigeria in 1948. His father was a teacher. He was introduced to art at a young age, and it stuck. He gained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art from the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, Nigeria and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from The Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Ogundipe has exhibited extensively in Nigeria, Europe and the United States , including The Orlando Museum of Art, the Maryland Museum of African Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and in “African Renaissance: Old Forms, New Images” at the Denver Art Museum. Moyo Ogundipe left his home town and came to the United States in the 1980s. He says he had to leave Nigeria because of economic, political, and technical reason. He says that his economy collapsed and was run by corrupt military talent. Nigeria wasn’t free politically under the military talent. Ogundipe says he needs a free environment, like America, to grow his talents. He can show his work to a larger and more sophisticated work audience in America. He also has access to all sorts of supplies here in America. Whereas, in Nigeria art supplies is scarce and expensive.
Even though Ogundipe loves the freedom he gets from living in America he says he does feel a sense of isolation in the diaspora, a sense of vulnerability. He misses his family, water, smell, sight, sun, warmth, and dust of home. He says that there is a loneliness that enters energizes and boost the diaspora feeling. In which makes it all more profound. What you miss physically you make up for in psychic compensation. He says that it does matter where he lives, and that if situations were right in his home town he probably wouldn’t have left, and that his work would look a lot different as a result. He goes as far as to conclude that perhaps if working with the images in Nigeria, surrounded by family and friends in the valleys and hills of Yorubaland, smeeling the scents and seeing the colors and lights of home would make his work more African, more Yoruba even. Or more simply put that he would be differently Yoruba.