What The Museo del Prado Experience Taught Us About Telling Our Own Stories

Last week, Art Report Africa served as the official media partner for New Narratives and Singular Communication in Arts Journalism: The Museo del Prado Experience — a two-day international workshop held at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, organised in partnership with the Embassy of Spain in Nigeria and Casa África through its #PeriodismoÁfrica programme.

New Narratives and Singular Communication in Arts Journalism: The Museo del Prado Experience | From left to right: Wale Alimi, Director. Artist, PhD. Jess Castellote, Director Yemisi Shyllon museum of art, Sunshine Alaibe, Director. Art Report Africa, Dr. Ike Obiaya, Dean of the School of media and Communication, PAU, Eva Barta Martin serves as the Cultural Adviser at the Embassy of Spain, Solomon Nkwagu, Communications Lead, YSMA | Image: Courtesy of Art Report Africa

The keynote was delivered by Carlos Chaguaceda, Director of Communications at the Prado — an institution that receives more than 3.5 million visitors annually and has become, in recent years, one of the most cited references in global cultural communication. He spoke on how museums build meaningful public relationships not through access alone, but through the deliberate construction of narrative.

That is a different conversation from the one Nigerian cultural media has mostly been having.

Dr. Jess Castellote, Director of YSMA, named it directly in his presentation on the art ecosystem and the journalist's mandate. The hidden mechanics of value, validation, and storytelling in the art world are not mysterious — they are learnable. But they require journalists who understand that reporting on culture is not documentation. It is interpretation. It shapes what gets remembered, what gets valued, and what disappears. Dr. Ike Obiaya, Dean of the School of Media and Communication at Pan-Atlantic University, and Dr. Nwachukwu Egbunike brought academic rigour to the same argument. Joan Tusell, Coordinator of #PeriodismoÁfrica at Casa África, put it plainly: the way culture is reported shapes how societies understand themselves, and how the world understands Africa.

For Art Report Africa, the partnership with this workshop is structural. The question of who tells these stories — and how well they tell them — is the question our existence is built on. Sitting in that room at YSMA, alongside journalists who cover culture in cities across Nigeria, was a reminder of both the scale of what still needs to be done and the quality of what is already being attempted.

Nigeria has one of the most significant contemporary art ecosystems on the continent. It does not yet have the journalism infrastructure that ecosystem deserves. That gap is a choice — one that institutions, media organisations, and international partners can make differently, as YSMA, Casa África, and the Prado demonstrated last week. The stories are here. The journalists are in the room. The work is in learning, collectively, how to tell them in a way that lasts.

The workshop was held at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, June 2026. Art Report Africa served as official media partner.