A Chrysalis No. 2

2021 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

91.44 x 45.72 cm

Yétúndé Olagbaju

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Yétúndé Olagbaju’s On becoming a star series recuperates the figure of ‘Mammy’, a stereotype rooted in American slavery that typically depicts a larger, dark skinned woman as a maternal presence, often within a domestic setting, and typically taking care of white children. After being referred to as a Mammy during their undergraduate degree, Olagbaju began exploring the figure in 2016 as a means of healing. Olagbaju’s first presentation on this topic was a book called Black Collectibles: Mammy and Friends (1997) that sells tchotchkes—like salt and pepper shakers or figurines—of the racist mammy image taking different forms, from which Olagbaju exorcised the Mammy images by carefully cutting them out of the book with a razor blade. With this act, and the many incarnations the gesture takes throughout the series, Olagbaju liberates Mammy from an exhausting existence as a culturally and racially charged entity, imagining the figure instead as a brilliant nebula reflecting across the cosmos. By revising Mammy’s origin story, the artist gives her, and themselves, a new agency that allows them to be obscured, unreadable, and vigorously independent. In A Chrysalis No. 2 , Olagbaju’s first public presentation of sculptural work, Mammy is transformed into a bust cast in bronze, providing a three-dimensional view of the many forms she might take collapsed into one. By casting Mammy in immutable bronze, but crafting a thumbprint in place of facial features, Olagbaju both firmly anchors her in the known physical world and permanently obstructs any traditional way of understanding or relating to her on a domestic human level.

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Yétúndé Olagbaju is an artist, organizer, strategist, and educator. Their practice employs video, sculpture, photography, gesture, and performance as methods to critically address Black labor, legacy, and processes of healing. Their practice draws upon a desire to understand history, the people that made it, the myths and realities surrounding them, and how Olagbaju’s own identity is implicated in history’s timeline. Major themes that the artist engages with in their work include myths and how they are produced, notions of motherhood, expectations concerning this role, and how racism and settler colonialism affect the ways that maternal and domestic labor are valued. In that vein, the artist is also concerned with perceptions of labor, what it is and means, who conducts certain kinds of labor, and what kinds of labor go unnoticed or erased. They are also invested in exploring the kinds of stories that get erased, and whether erasure can be conceived of as a tool for liberation and transformation. Considering transformation, Olagbaju’s work meditates on how change occurs and how to hold space for change and honor transformation. Questions that the artist poses hinge on memorialization and how to memorialize transformation and unseen labor. Pressingly, Olagbaju asks: How does one memorialize the vastness of Blackness and Black legacy?

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Colors:

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• racism.n.01
• identity.n.01
• labor.n.01
• bondage.n.02
• woman.n.01