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...
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...
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...
In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon...
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...
This photograph is part of the series titled “Iris Tingitana project” (2007) focusing on the disappearance of the iris...
This series of photographs is inspired by the artist’s travels to Jos, Nigeria...
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...