As she traces the same shape again and again, Ojih Odutola’s lines become darker and deeper, sometimes pushed to the point where their blackness becomes luminous. Set against a blank white background, as in Untitled (2015), Ojih Odutola’s figures are stark, resolute in their darkness. The surface of her subject’s skin becomes ribbon-like, lines weaving across the contours of their head and neck. The simplicity and starkness of Ojih Odutola’s composition—most often, black on white, sometimes with shots of color woven through the deep black lines—enable 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...
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...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
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...
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A Jacob Lawrence Expert on a Profile of Him from ARTnews’s Archives – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All January 24, 2020 1:35pm George Chinsee Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) was one of the deftest documentarians of African-American life in the United States, and over the next few years, people across the country will get a chance to see one of his greatest series of paintings, “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954–56), united in full for the first time...
The Great Game is a series of works composed of a number of card combinations illustrated by the faces of key political figures shaping the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East...
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...
Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture...
In 2003, Nike released a pair of red and black sneakers (the Dunk Low Pro SB ) that were marketed as “vampire” sneakers...
On a piece of paper, the artist has traced two loops in black crayon and placed two eyes where the lines intersect...
Inside Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys’s Collection at the Brooklyn Museum | Artsy Skip to Main Content Advertisement Art Market Inside Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys’s Collection at the Brooklyn Museum Jewels Dodson Feb 9, 2024 5:25PM Installation view of “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” at the Brooklyn Museum, 2024...