El Anatsui first discovered the unlikely medium that would change the world, not to mention the artist’s own life, in 1998. Walking down a street in Nsukka, Nigeria, where he taught art at the local university, he noticed a giant trash bag bursting with liquor bottle-caps, dumped by a nightclub cleaning crew. The caps were red and golden, with silver undersides, bearing Western brand names that resonate worldwide with status and prestige: Hennessy, Remy Martin, Courvoiser, Metaxa, Ciroc, Grey Goose, Skyy.

He was already a sculptor as well as a teacher of art, who had begun his life as an artist by carving traditional African motifs in wood. From there, he had begun playing with used metal –  the lids of evaporated milk cans, and discarded cassava graters.

The caps from the bottles of expensive spirits added a potent new dimension to the visual conversation: brandy, rum and whiskey were distinctly European, vibrating with the legacy of centuries of enslavement, culture-theft, and soul-plunder.  He flattened the soft foil that had wrapped the necks of the bottles into strips, pierced the strips and the round caps, and joined them together with tiny rings of copper wire, fashioning a new supple, gleaming fabric, a raiment for queens, from roadside trash.

As the artist explained to The Guardian in 2002, “Alcohol was one of the commodities brought with Europeans to exchange for goods in Africa. Eventually alcohol became one of the items used in the transatlantic slave trade. They made rum in the West Indies, took it to Liverpool, and then it made its way back to Africa.”

Today, distilleries deliver tons of cast-off caps to his Nsukka studio, a source which may vanish as cost-conscious liquor vendors switch to plastic packaging. He has expanded his medium to include other forms of scrap metal including snippets of aluminum roofing strips, and demand from the world’s premium art dealers requires that he employ a team of skilled assembly-artisans. Among his recent projects is an altarpiece for Ghana’s new national cathedral in Accra.

Anatsui, known as “El” to his friends, is the recipient of some of the art world’s most coveted laurels including the Prince Claus Award, The Praemium Imperiale, and the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.

From the beginning, his genre-bending art was matched by his reputation as an unflinching defender of the value of his own work.  Prior to his emergence into the international art scene, the work of African artists had been disgracefully low-balled by galleries and collectors.  Anatsui would have none of it, his massive, glinting, sensually draping works priced well into the millions from early on.

The artist’s work is enigmatic, and knowing. His enormous creations fold down into a soft, gleaming bundle; his earlier works literally fit into a suitcase. Anatsui doesn’t work from sketches, and doesn’t instruct curators how to display or install the works. Every time a piece travels, there may be tears or dents in the soft metal, and generally the artist doesn’t recommend repairs. And every time a piece is installed, it looks different from any past display. One large sculpture installed in Marrakech faded from ruby-red to sandstone pink after several months in the merciless Saharan sun.  The artist was accepting of the desert’s effects, and never considered replacing the bleached pieces.

Yet for all of its fragility, and for the humility of the technically “worthless” raw materials, the work of El Anatsui calmly prevails with a kingly resiliency. Case in point: when Hurricane Sandy flooded galleries in Chelsea, NY, ruining Eurocentric masterpieces of canvas and paper, El Anatsui had no cause for panic. His works endured the storms unharmed, requiring little more than a gentle pass with a towel to rise and shine once again.

All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.