It’s one of the great origin stories in contemporary art, a flash of instinct that would revolutionize a field. In 1998, El Anatsui was walking around Nsukka, Nigeria, and noticed a bag of aluminum bottle caps by the roadside.
Anatsui, then a professor at the University of Nigeria who was drawn to daily-life materials in his own art practice, took the bag to his studio. He began to play with the caps: folding them, slicing them in rounds and opening their cylindrical sides.
Read more at the New York Times.