Nigerian multidisciplinary artist Williams Chechet has been named LEADERSHIP Newspaper’s Artist of the Year 2026, marking a significant moment in a career that has spent the past decade reshaping how Northern Nigerian culture, history, and identity can be represented through contemporary visual art.

The recognition comes as Chechet reflects on ten years of working across digital illustration, painting, collage, graphic design, murals, and installation. In a message shared following the announcement, the artist described the honour as the result of years of “showing up, experimenting, taking risks, facing uncertainty, and believing in the power” of his work.

For Chechet, the award arrives at an especially meaningful point in his journey. Born in Kano and raised in Kaduna, he has built a practice rooted in the visual memory of Northern Nigeria while consistently pushing those references into contemporary artistic and popular cultural spaces.

His work frequently draws from archival photographs, Hausa iconography, traditional dress, horsemen, and historical figures. Through vivid colour, digital manipulation, collage, and pop-art influences, Chechet revisits these images and gives them new contexts. His practice has become particularly important for the way it challenges narrow representations of Northern Nigeria, offering images shaped not only by contemporary realities but also by culture, fashion, history, imagination, and memory.

William Chechet, Together (2026) 30.6 x 34.5 inches Archival Giclee Print on Etching Rag 310gsm Fine-Art Textured Paper. Courtesy of the Artist.

One of the defining moments in this journey came in 2017 with We Are The North, his first solo exhibition presented in Lagos in collaboration with Alliance Française. At a time when representations of Northern Nigeria were often dominated by narratives of insecurity and political instability, Chechet presented another visual possibility.

The exhibition brought together history and contemporary culture through a colourful and confident visual language, establishing questions around representation and identity that have continued to shape his practice.

Over the years, Chechet has expanded that language across different mediums and contexts. His background in Industrial Design at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, has helped inform a practice that moves fluidly between fine art, design, public art, and popular culture.

That versatility has also taken his work into major art platforms internationally. Chechet has exhibited in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, and Morocco, with appearances at ART X Lagos, FNB Art Joburg, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and Latitudes Art Fair.

In 2024, his practice entered another important space when NBA Nigeria commissioned Breaking Barriers, a large-scale mixed-media installation for ART X Lagos. The work combined textiles, magazine clippings, slogans, and his recognisable African pop-art vocabulary to explore movement, teamwork, and collective energy through basketball.

He later extended this interest in participation and community through Rise Together, an installation that invited visitors to contribute to a collective collage.

William Chechet, My Dreamland Medium: Archival Giclee Print on Etching Rag 310gsm Fine-Art Paper. Edition of 5. (Edition 3) Size: 31.5 x 31.5 inches Year: 2020. Courtesy of the Artist.

Chechet’s work has also travelled beyond galleries and art fairs. He has created murals for Hard Rock Cafe Lagos, MTV Base Africa, CoLab, and RydeFit, designed album artwork for Nigerian musicians including M.I Abaga, and collaborated with Glenfiddich. These projects reflect an artist comfortable moving between contemporary art and the wider visual culture that shapes everyday life.

Meanwhile, exhibitions such as Hyperflux in 2020 and Wake Up We’re Still Dreaming in 2023 have shown his continued interest in identity, memory, imagination, and self-representation.

Being named LEADERSHIP Newspaper’s Artist of the Year 2026 therefore recognises more than Chechet’s ability to work across multiple disciplines. The award acknowledges a decade of building a distinctive artistic language and using it to bring Northern Nigerian histories and visual traditions into contemporary conversations.

For an artist whose work has consistently returned to questions of representation, memory, and cultural identity, the recognition also marks an important moment of visibility.

As Chechet looks towards the next chapter of his career, the award offers an opportunity to reflect on what ten years of persistence and experimentation have produced. His journey demonstrates that cultural heritage does not need to be preserved by keeping it unchanged. It can be reimagined through new materials, technologies, colours, and audiences.

For Williams Chechet, LEADERSHIP Newspaper’s Artist of the Year 2026 is both recognition of the work already done and a significant milestone in a journey that continues to expand the possibilities of how Northern Nigeria is seen, remembered, and imagined.