Nigeria will soon offer to visitors a new cultural institution which will set up new standards for art in Africa. The Museum of West African Art (MOWAA), based in Benin City, Nigeria, will officially open to the public on November 11, 2025. It is however a first step as the complete museum is planned to open by 2028.
Located in Benin City , in the heart of the current Edo State in Nigeria, MOWAA was announced in 2020. The new-generation museum has the ambition to bring together ancient and contemporary West African art becoming an center where visitors and artists will be able to meet and interact together.
MOWAA campus has been planned as a huge complex housing. It includes a center for conservation, creation, and research with the museum. But it will also integrate a a contemporary art exhibition space (the Rainforest Gallery), a boutique hotel (the Art Guesthouse), an art school and a performance space (the Artisans’ Hall). Its main purpose is to turn into a center for the transmission of regional cultural heritage.
Highlights of the museum will be the presentation of some of the looted art pieces during colonial times. It is estimated that two dozens of cultural institutions located in Europe and the USA have important collections of Bronzes from the former Kingdom of Benin.
Looted art to be exhibited at the museum
The art collection will consequently present a large number of art pieces which have been returned from other museums around the world. This includes 119 Benin royal bronzes from the Dutch State Collection in the Netherlands. The return is unconditional, as the Netherlands recognised that the objects were looted during the British attack on Benin City in 1897.
The Hornemann Museum in London returned 72 Benin Bronzes while the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art also gave back art pieces. When opening in November, part of these pieces will be visible to the public.
