Ojih Odutola uses a distinctive visual style to capture members of her family, rendering them one pen stroke at a time, until their skin resembles ribbons woven into the contours of a face, neck, or hand. The simplicity of Ojih Odutola’s compositions enables a consideration of skin, blackness, surface, and detail, all hovering out of time and space.
Though born in Nigeria, artist Toyin Ojih Odutola was raised largely in the United States, living in Alabama, California, and now New York. Known for her intricate drawings of human heads and figures, Ojih Odutola’s artistic practice is concerned with the representation of race, and the concept of blackness as visual marker and social construct. Her drawings are made through intricately and fastidiously layering black lines—building up a density that Ojih Odutola describes as “black on black on black.” Using pens and markers as her primary media, Ojih Odutola builds textures through sinewy black lines, shot through at times with metallic color. The ripples and rolls of the figures’ surfaces recall the anatomical structure of musculature, and also provide an unreal look to her often stoic figures.
Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...
In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon...
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot...