When Art Becomes a Conversation 

Against the dark background, her white dress and gele glow. The details accumulate: lipstick stains, white pearls catching light, the fullness of her form, and then her eyes. Those eyes arrest you. They carry an old sadness, the kind that comes from waiting for something that never arrives.

This was the image that launched Anthony Azekwoh’s wedding series. The Bridesmaid detonated across social media within days, and viewers began constructing narratives: she’s a queer woman watching her former lover marry someone else, some said. As of writing this, the image sits at 10.3 million views on X. Azekwoh has since posted companion pieces, The Best Man, The Maid of Honor, each one accruing its own flood of attention and interpretation.

Here’s where it gets interesting. When audiences started spinning theories about the bridesmaid’s sorrow, Azekwoh turned it into participation, launching a storytelling contest with cash prizes for the three best narratives. The outcome was an explosion of stories about the art. 

This is the shift in real time: an artist who orchestrates conversations around his work, who understands that in 2025, the art extends into the stories his audience tells themselves. Azekwoh sits at the center of how Nigerians are experiencing art now, and he’s not alone in this transformation.

Something fundamental is shifting in how we encounter art, not just visual art, but writing, photography, and digital creation. Storytelling has become infrastructure, the scaffolding upon which artistic communities are built. And Azekwoh understands this instinctively.

Make no mistake, the old model still exists: gallery walls, ticket counters, oohs and ahhs before a piece of art. But it’s become a secondary experience. Now, the gallery opening is often the culmination of weeks or months of digital conversation. You can’t fill a room without first filling a comment section.

Consider Uzo Njoku, whose “Owambe” exhibition became a cultural flashpoint, partly due to the work itself, but also partly due to the deliberate misspelling that sparked intense online vitriol. But beyond that, Uzo, too, has mastered the rules of engagement. She scouted performing arts students to reenact African folklore at the exhibition. She invited local businesses to participate, turning the space into a marketplace of creativity. She included teenagers, not as token youth representatives but as genuine collaborators.

Fine Artist Renike Olusanya is working in similar territory. The visual artist and illustrator, also co-founder of Shopbawsty, has built her practice around the idea that audiences are part of its ecosystem. The line between creator and community keeps blurring, and artists like Olusanya are the ones moving the pencil.

Social media has since demolished the gatekeepers. An artist does not necessarily need gallery representation or institutional blessing from an artistic godfather anymore. Instagram and TikTok have become the new galleries; virality can replace curatorial approval. An artist can now build a following, sell directly to collectors, or get commissioned for a single post. The playing field isn’t level as algorithms still favor those with resources, access, or existing visibility, but it’s far more navigable than it’s ever been. What used to take years of networking and validation from industry insiders can now unfold overnight with a well-timed drop or a video that resonates. 

The difference now is in the architecture of storytelling itself. Azekwoh has always been a skilled painter, but with the wedding series, he’s mastered the serial release, the art world’s version of a prestige TV drop. He started with a single image, let it simmer and spread, then expanded the universe one character at a time. Each new post is built on the last, turning casual viewers into invested followers waiting for the next art.

The strategy has paid off materially. Azekwoh now values the Wedding Collection at roughly $8,150 (₦12.1m). Not bad for a series that began as a single melancholic woman in a white dress, her story told and retold by thousands of strangers who felt they knew her grief.

Not all participation is created equal. There’s a spectrum: at one end, the passive double-tap; at the other, true interest. Our wedding series artist’s writer awards sit somewhere in the middle, interactive, not fully collaborative. He’s inviting response, sparking dialogue, but the core artwork remains his. It’s a careful dance. Too much control and you’re just performing engagement; too little and your artistic voice dissolves into space.

The risks are real. Artists worry about dilution, about chasing trends dictated by algorithms rather than vision. Yet the rewards justify the risk. Deeper engagement means sustained attention in an oversaturated market. When audiences feel ownership over art’s direction, they become invested in its success. They show up to exhibitions, they share the work, and they defend it in comment sections. In the attention economy, participation is the new patronage.

The bigger questions loom. Does all this participation deepen our relationship with art, or does it distract from the work itself? When the community becomes the artwork, what happens to the singular artistic vision we’ve valued for centuries?

Maybe we’re witnessing a shift from “experiencing art” to “living with art”—from occasional gallery visits to ongoing creative relationships. Perhaps the wedding series was always preparing us for this moment. Weddings, after all, are the ultimate communal ritual. Everyone plays a role: the dancer, the witness, the one who sprays money, the auntie offering unsolicited advice. The celebration only works when everyone shows up. The artist saw this instinctively, his paintings capturing entire communities in motion. Now, he’s creating that same dynamic around the art itself. We’re not just viewers anymore, admiring from a distance. We’re participants in a larger story, one that’s still being written.

Between the wedding canvases hang printouts of submitted stories, sticky notes with ideas from followers. The art has become conversation, and the conversation has become art. The circle widens with each person who steps in.

“Come,” the work seems to say. “There’s room here for your story too.”