Defining and quantifying “art” is entirely subjective. What one person considers sublime, another could find meaningless. Alternatively, two people might agree that something is art, which has more to do with their mutual understandings and expectations of what art is—and can be—rather than if something is “good” or “bad.”

The argument over “what is art” becomes even more complicated when discussing traditional art versus digital art, with traditionalists often decrying web3 art and digital art as something outside the realm of art itself. Africa’s foremost digital artist, Prince Jacon Osinachi Igwe—known professionally as Osinachi—hasn’t time for such distinctions, it should all exist under one umbrella: Art.

“My work for the past three years or so has not just been about creating art, but bridging the traditional art world and the web3 world together as one art world,” Osinachi said to me in a recent interview. “That’s important because it’s about the art being made, [not the terms that define it].”

As part of his efforts to merge digital and physical art realms, the Nigerian-born Osinachi collaborated with the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) to create never-before-seen digital art as part of TMA’s inaugural Digital Artists in Residency program, which is part of its recently launched TMA Labs.

The production, Sankofa Carnival, features a four-part series of collectible digital art drops from Osinachi and Yusuf Lateef—a Toledo-based visual artist who’s also part of the TMA Residency program. (Osinachi’s ABITT: THE SECOND RENAISSANCE IS COMING and Lateef’s Eurydice both sold at auction through Christie’s digital art sale in December 2023.)

The goal of Sankofa Carnival is to create a community around digital art and bring art powered by blockchain to a wider, mainstream audience.

Series One—The Mba Assembly—consists of 10,000 generative portraits of people and animals collaged into compositions by Osinachi that draw from TMA’s photography archives. Each piece is minted on-demand and stored in TMA visitor’s wallets that are created automatically through web3 platform Mojito when visitors view the collection in real life (IRL) or virtually online.

The MBA Assembly banner by Osinachi

Series Two—Orpheo’s Symphony—is a 1,000 piece limited collection from Lateef, which is a modern reimagining of the eponymous Orpheus of the 1959 film, Black Orpheus. The works are only available to be minted by those who hold a piece from the Series One collection.

Series Three—The Picklers—will consist of 100 works made individually by Osinachi on the Ethereum blockchain, capturing his depiction of pickleball as a metaphor for emotional reciprocity and building community. Collectors will need to hold works from Series One and Series Two in order to obtain a Series Three piece.

The final series—Series Four—is comprised of two one-of-one digitally native artworks, one by Osinachi and the other by Lateef.

All together through Sankofa Carnival, the Toledo museum aims to expand the general public’s understanding of digital art by helping familiarize them with blockchain and nonfungible token (NFT) technology in a unique and immersive way.

But for Osinachi, digital art has been a way of life ever since he went to a secondhand bookstore as a child and discovered a book about the Italian master artists. He then tried to replicate their beauty using a computer.

“Flipping through that book was like art education for me,” Osinachi said. “Looking at those paintings and trying to think of how I could create something just as beautiful—that was sort of the first time I came in contact with art.”

As he became older, Osinachi would read poetry on the Internet and would submit his own writing for publication on websites.

“That’s when I thought to myself, ‘I could create visual illustrations of the things I’m writing about,’ and started exploring the drawing tools on Microsoft Word to do it,” he said. “It still surprises me that people are sort of shocked I create my work using Microsoft Word because the tools are there. As far back as 2004, I’ve been using Microsoft Word to try and create artwork.”

But do the tools really matter? In terms of a finished product, perhaps there’s no difference between art crafted on canvas with oil versus those utilizing the color palette of Microsoft Word. It’s a distinction digital artists like Osinachi aim to erase.

“Microsoft Word was what was immediately available to me,” Osinachi said. “I had to work within the limitations of it to be able to achieve whatever vision I had. Over the years, I’ve worked within the limits to the point where I now push Word to achieve the vision that I want.”

The museum is using Osinachi’s collections to bring more awareness to how blockchain art can exist.

“Naturally, when the museum reached out and wanted to do the residency—which, of course, led to Sankofa Carnival—they were very much aware of me being involved in blockchain. Part of what the museum leadership wanted to achieve was to use blockchain as a tool to galvanize community,” he said. 

The general public has been able to wrap their heads around how blockchain is both immersed within Osinachi’s work and is helping build the community around the work itself, Osinachi said.

“While Sankofa Carnival is still a work in progress, so far people have been able to go to the museum, scan the QR code, get the artworks from the collection, and shout out to me on Instagram and Twitter,” he said. “What this brings about is a sense of pride and belonging to something that the museum is doing, and I see it in the way people reach out to me."

Osinachi is also on a mission to destigmatize the term “NFT.” He’s well aware of how skeptics have muddied the term and hopes the Sankofa Carnival experience will help demonstrate that NFTs are simply a technology digital artists are using to add value to their work and empower themselves.

“I had a number of conversations with TMA donors and board members, and they kept asking, ‘What are NFTs?’,” Osinachi said. “They weren’t asking as skeptics but rather as people who were curious because they were telling me their grandkids are talking about NFTs and digital art. They didn’t understand it. Having the museum involved gave them a sense of, ‘I’m doing this thing that my grandkids were telling me about that I did not fully understand, but now I get the basics of.’ It’s all part of the culture and it's all part of art history—and from my conversations—mostly everyone understood it.”

As for his future works, Osinachi plans to remain focused on bridging the divide between the traditional and digital art worlds until both are fully immersed as one artform. He envisions a future where we may not be hearing the term “NFT,” but rather, when someone mentions “digital art,” we’ll instantly understand or believe it to mean “art on the blockchain.”

“I was in Miami for Art Basel and met a number of important people in the art world,” Osinachi said. “Some of them were not so sure about these things called NFTs, which I think comes from a misunderstanding of the term. What they don’t understand is that NFTs are a technology backing the digital art, which is on the blockchain. They’re thinking more about collectibles and collections, as opposed to what you might call ‘fine digital art.’ That’s where the misunderstanding comes from, and so my work has been about bringing these two worlds together so people who don’t understand each other can begin to understand each other. Those in web3 don’t really understand those in traditional art, and those in traditional art don’t fully understand those in web3. It’s about bringing these two worlds together through collaborations, so that is what my work will continue to be about.”