Sokari Douglas Camp was born in Buguma, an island town in Rivers State, Nigeria. She studied Fine Art at Central School of Art and Design and then the Royal College of Art. Camp has represented Britain and Nigeria in national and international exhibitions and has had more than 40 solo shows worldwide including at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute and The Museum of Mankind London. Her work is in permanent collections at The Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C., Setagaya Museum, Tokyo and the British Museum, London.
In 2003, Camp was a shortlisted artist for the Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth. In 2005, she was awarded a CBE in recognition of her services to art. In the same year, she became an Honorary Fellow of the University of the Arts London; she also recently became an Honorary Fellow of SOAS. Her public artworks include Battle Bus: Living Memorial for Ken Saro‐Wiwa, 2006, a full-scale replica of a Nigerian steel bus, which stands as a monument to the late Niger Delta activist and writer. Battle Bus travelled to Nigeria as part of Action Saro-Wiwa, a campaign to clean up the Niger Delta Summer in 2015.
In 2012, her work, All The World Is Now Richer, a memorial to commemorate the abolition of slavery, was exhibited in The House of Commons before travelling to Bristol Cathedral, Norwich Cathedral and St George’s Hall in Liverpool. The sculpture was exhibited in St Paul’s Cathedral London, 2014 and the Doge’s Prigioni Venice, 2016. The work is presented as part of the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017.
