Where to See It: Collections, Online Access and Restitution
A practical guide to the museums holding Yoruba art in Nigeria and abroad, what can be searched online and where, and a factual account of the restitution and provenance position as it stands.
Most Yoruba art that a person can actually look at is either in Nigeria, in a handful of large museums in the United States and Europe, or online in collection databases that are free to search. This file is a practical guide to all three, plus a factual statement of where restitution stands, because the question comes up immediately and is usually answered with more heat than accuracy.
In Nigeria
The National Commission for Museums and Monuments, NCMM, administers the national collections .
National Museum, Lagos, on Onikan in Lagos Island, holds the pure-copper Obalúfọ̀n mask, the Lajuwa terracotta head, and the Tada and Jebba copper-alloy figures from the Niger, alongside a wide general collection . It is the single most important museum of Nigerian art in the country.
National Museum, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, holds much of the Ifẹ̀ material including a substantial part of the Wunmonije group of copper-alloy heads and the Ita Yemòó material . It sits in the city where the objects were made, near the sites where they were found, which is a different and better viewing experience than any of the diaspora museums can provide.
Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005, roughly 75 hectares of forest on the Ọ̀ṣun river outside Òṣogbo, containing shrines, sanctuaries and the monumental cement, iron and mud sculptures of Susanne Wenger's New Sacred Art movement . It is a living religious site as well as a monument, and the annual Ọ̀ṣun festival in August is the point of maximum activity.
Nike Art Gallery, Lekki, Lagos, run by Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye, holds over 7,000 works and is described as the largest art gallery in West Africa, with a strong concentration of adìrẹ and contemporary Nigerian art, and the associated centres offer free training .
Palaces. Several Yoruba palaces retain carved veranda posts and doors in situ, including at Ìkẹ̀rẹ́-Ekiti and Èfọ̀n-Aláàyè, though many of the finest posts have been sold or removed. Access is by permission of the palace, not by ticket, and the etiquette matters.
A realistic note. Nigerian museum funding, conservation capacity, security and display standards are constrained, opening hours are unreliable, and photography rules vary. This is a resourcing problem and it is worth naming, because it is frequently used rhetorically as an argument against restitution, and the two are separate questions. Underfunding a museum is not an argument that its objects belong elsewhere.
Outside Nigeria
British Museum, London. Holds the Ifẹ̀ head, accession Af1939,34.1, which entered the collection in 1939 via Henry Maclear Bate and the National Art Collections Fund . Also holds the Olówè of Ìṣẹ̀ door and lintel from the Ìkẹ̀rẹ́ palace, shown at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley and acquired thereafter . Its online collection database is searchable and includes images.
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC. Holds work by Bámigbóyè and other named carvers, mounted the 1998 exhibition Ọlọ́wẹ̀ of Isẹ̀: A Yoruba Sculptor to Kings curated by Roslyn Adele Walker, and houses the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, which include the Marilyn Houlberg Nigeria collection of 8,515 colour slides from fieldwork between 1961 and about 2007, with an ìbejì series of roughly 854 slides . The photographic archive is arguably more valuable than the object collection for understanding how these things were used.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Holds the Olówè veranda post with equestrian and female figure, ìbejì figures, and beaded regalia including an adéńlá . Its online collection is comprehensive and openly licensed for much of the material.
Art Institute of Chicago. Holds the Olówè Veranda Post, Ọ̀pó Ògògá, one of the four carved for the Ògògà of Ìkẹ̀rẹ́, and ìbejì figures . Its online records are unusually detailed.
Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles. One of the largest African collections in the United States, covering metalwork, wood carving, textiles, musical instruments, urban popular arts and ceramics, with Yoruba material a particular strength, and an online collections portal . It mounted The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond, over 100 works spanning Nigeria, Benin and the Yoruba diaspora in Brazil, Cuba and the United States, which is the exhibition to look at if the diaspora dimension is the interest .
Brooklyn Museum, New York. Holds the beaded crown of Onijagbo Obasoro Alowolodu, Ògògà of Ìkẹ̀rẹ́, who reigned from 1890 to 1928, one of the few crowns securely tied to a named ruler and reign .
Others worth knowing. The Saint Louis Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art which holds an Olówè palace door, the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, the Horniman Museum in London whose photographic archive documents calabash working and which holds Ògbóni material, the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, and the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich, which holds Olówè material.
Online
Museum databases. The British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian NMAfA, the Brooklyn Museum and the Fowler all publish searchable online collections with images, and several release images under open licences . Searching a museum database directly is far more productive than a general web search, because the records carry accession numbers, measurements, materials and provenance notes.
Practical search advice: search by object type in Yoruba, since ere ibeji, opon Ifa, ose Sango, edan Ogboni and epa return good results, and search by carver name, since Olowe of Ise, Areogun, Bamgboye and Bamigboye are all indexed at several institutions. Diacritics are usually stripped in database indexing, so search without them.
Smithsonian SOVA, the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives, holds the finding aids for the Houlberg photographic collection and field notes . This is where photographs of objects in use, rather than objects on plinths, can be found.
Digital Benin, at digitalbenin.org, launched in 2022, connects data on 5,304 objects across 139 institutions in 21 countries, with provenance names, oral histories, object research, an Edo language catalogue and a map of collections worldwide . It concerns Benin rather than Yoruba objects, and it is listed here because it is the model for what a provenance database can be and because the Ifẹ̀ and Benin material is constantly confused. No equivalent exists for Yoruba objects, which is a real gap.
Open-access scholarship. Sola Olorunyomi's Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent is fully open access at books.openedition.org. The Frontiers in Communication and Frontiers in Psychology papers on dùndún and bàtá speech surrogacy are open access and contain audio and figures. Suzanne Blier's African Arts article on Ifẹ̀ is on her Harvard page. Roslyn Walker's Ọlọ́wẹ̀ of Isẹ̀ catalogue is on the Internet Archive.
Audio and video. Recordings of dùndún and bàtá are widely available on streaming platforms, and the discography of the popular genres, from Yusuf Olátúnjí and Haruna Ishola through I. K. Dairo, Obey, Sunny Adé, Barrister and Fela, is substantially reissued. For the traditional repertoires, the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme project on bàtá making at emkp.org is documentation of the craft rather than only the sound .
The restitution and provenance position
This has to be stated carefully because the categories differ.
Benin, not Yoruba, is the mass restitution case. The Benin bronzes were looted by British military forces in the punitive expedition of February 1897 and distributed immediately afterward, which is an unusually well-documented act of theft and is why the claim is legally and morally clear . The Netherlands returned 119 Benin objects in June 2025, among the largest single repatriations to date . The Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art removed Benin bronzes from display and moved to repatriate them, and a joint ceremony with the National Gallery of Art and the RISD Museum marked the return of 31 objects . The British Museum, holding roughly 928 Benin works, has returned none, citing the British Museum Act 1963, which restricts deaccessioning . The Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin City, designed by David Adjaye on the site of the historic royal palace, is the intended destination for much returned material .
Ifẹ̀ is a different case and the difference is factual, not rhetorical. The great majority of the Ifẹ̀ corpus never left Nigeria and is held by the NCMM at Lagos and Ilé-Ifẹ̀ . The most prominent piece abroad, the British Museum's Ifẹ̀ head, was removed in the 1930s through commercial and colonial-administrative channels rather than by military looting . That is still a colonial-era removal from a colonised territory and it is not innocent, but it is not the 1897 case and it is not usually named in the same claims.
Most Yoruba objects in Western museums were bought. Ìbejì figures, ọpọ́n Ifá, ọ̀ṣé Ṣàngó, masks and textiles overwhelmingly entered collections through purchase, from families, from traders, from dealers, during a period when missionary and later Pentecostal pressure was actively defining these objects as idols to be surrendered and when the prices offered were substantial by local standards. That is a real transaction and it is also not a free one, and both halves of that sentence should stay attached. Descriptions that call this looting are inaccurate; descriptions that call it a fair market are evasive.
The documentation problem is the one that can still be fixed. The largest single loss is not physical possession, it is information: who made the object, who commissioned it, where it stood, what was done with it, and what happened to the family that sold it. Attribution work has recovered some of this for named masters, but the great majority of records say "Yoruba peoples, Nigeria, 20th century" and nothing more. A Yoruba provenance database on the Digital Benin model, built with the NCMM, would be a substantial contribution and does not currently exist.