Toyin Ojih Odutola Is Drawing Up Worlds

New York Times

22-05-2025

On the eve of opening 'Ilé Oriaku,' her magisterial new exhibition of large-scale drawings — some more than six feet high, executed with equal bravura and precision in charcoal, pastel, graphite and colored pencil — Toyin Ojih Odutola was touring the show, in Jack Shainman Gallery's downtown space, calling in spirits.
'A point in Nigerian culture that I learned is that there's always ancestors with you,' said Ojih Odutola, who was born in Ilé-Ifè, Nigeria, and raised largely in Alabama. She had paused before a diptych that occupied its own little island on the gallery floor. Titled 'Lẹhin Mgbede (Before + After the Evening's Performance),' it shows characters in varying states of preparation or repose. In the backdrop — ochers and oranges in one panel, arresting pinks in the other — hover spectral faces, like witnesses from beyond.
'There's a saying that whenever you enter a room, it's not just you,' she said. 'It's all of the people who made you, entering with you. And so that's kind of what you see in the background.'
Ojih Odutola, 39, is known for both her prodigious technique — her drawings often look like paintings from afar — and for her distinctive subject matter. She devises characters that are loosely based on Nigerian history and society and stages them in speculative, often gender-blurring fictional scenarios.
Imagine, for example, two noble families, one Yoruba and one Igbo, united by the same-sex marriage of their scions — an elegant transgression that she developed in her breakout Whitney Museum exhibition in 2017. Or there was the conceit for her series 'Satellite,' at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2022: A technologist in a future Lagos joins a service to remedy 'self-forgetfulness' and finds themselves in introspective dialogue with a ghostly spirit.
With 'Ilé Oriaku' — in this presentation, some 31 drawings made in the last two years — Ojih Odutola is showing what is arguably her most personal work yet, and also the most plural. Personal, because its prompt was the artist's grief after the death of her grandmother in 2023; the exhibition includes a rare self-portrait, a portrait of her grandmother and a few lines of elegiac text by her mother.
And plural, because that inquiry found her researching Nigerian women's protests against British colonial rule; Mbari houses, structures used for spiritual and community purposes; Nigeria's post-independence intellectual energy before the crushing Biafra War; and more. But rather than transmit such topics in a didactic manner, Ojih Odutola distills them with global references — from art history, literature, fashion, current events.
The result, said Leigh Raiford, a scholar at the University of California at Berkeley who has followed her career closely, is 'propulsive, immersive and dreamlike,' with a beauty that stems partly from its 'capacity to confound.'
Try as one might to wedge Ojih Odutola's work into these categories with their shibboleths and stereotypes — Nigerian, African American, Black figuration — she is always bursting out.
'The freedom and autonomy of my characters is really important to me,' she said. For instance, their gender ambiguity: 'That kind of freedom is so important, especially when any kind of diasporic African expression in the figure is so restricted. I'm trying my best to just pry open as much as I can, stretch it and expand it.'
Her stance is paying off, on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2024, she received the Studio Museum in Harlem's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, while also appearing in the Nigerian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, an ambitious presentation of Nigerian-origin artists imagining alternative Nigerian histories and futures.
Aindrea Emelife, the curator of the pavilion, said that it felt vital to include Ojih Odutola precisely for the agency that the artist demands for her characters. 'Beyond their poetic force, her works reframe the portrait as a site of power,' Emelife said. 'Her speculative storytelling elevates Nigerian narratives within the canon of contemporary art, asserting their place not as exception but as foundation.'
'Ilé Oriaku,' in its New York incarnation, includes pieces that appeared in Ojih Odutola's 2024 solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel, in Switzerland, along with her works from the Venice pavilion and a few new drawings. Though many have a contemplative tone, the aggregate effect is vibrant. There's a sly, quasi-Surrealist humor in compositions like 'A Flexible Spirit (Awon ohuru),' with its fractured planes and its ludic main character clad in a gauze-like veil and red gloves. 'It's one of the Mbari spirits having a good time,' Ojih Odutola said; it's also her tribute to one of her favorite paintings, 'Mirror,' by Frank Bowling.
And in 'Showa Era Drag,' which has references to a Ryuichi Sakamoto album cover and a vintage Comme des Garçons outfit of Ojih Odutola's liking, and 'Congregation,' with its three figures caught gossiping or complaining, the energy approaches camp. 'This corner is like the fun times, the partying,' Ojih Odutola said.
Still, the root was sorrow. Ojih Odutola moved back to Alabama during the height of the coronavirus pandemic to get away from New York, its pressure and winters, and to be close to her parents, retired chemistry and nursing professors. She was at their home near Huntsville when the news arrived from Nigeria that her grandmother, Josephine Oriaku Ojih, who was a major presence in her childhood, had died. 'I literally had a week where I was speaking gibberish,' she said of her reaction. She thought she was making sense but was incomprehensible to her parents.
This shock seeped in different ways into the work, she said. 'It was this idea of trying to encapsulate in the visuals the disconnect and dissociation I was experiencing, and how words were just not sufficient.'
More directly, the exhibition includes an audio track, in which we hear her grandmother, recorded in 2018, spliced with birdsong that the artist taped outside after she heard the news.
'Ilé Oriaku' extends a kind of social and psychological deconstruction long present in Ojih Odutola's work. With Yoruba and Muslim roots (on her father's side) and Igbo and Christian ones (on her mother's), and having spent formative years in the American South, she processes the accumulated cultural information as a kind of cosmos of possibility. (The title alone — 'Ilé' is 'house' in Yoruba, while 'Oriaku,' her grandmother's name, is an Igbo word — would be an unusual, even illogical juxtaposition to many Nigerian ears, yet makes inherent sense for her.)
To add, say, references to 18th-century Japanese prints or classic Hollywood movies, reflects how these and other sources have shaped her tastes and ideas. 'I think it's important to understand that what you are is because of a disparate group of agents and elements,' she said. 'Not just in your family line, but globally as well. I'm very attuned to that, and it's in my pictures.'
It's a far cry, yet also a coherent journey from her early exhibitions of monochrome black ballpoint portrait studies on plain white backgrounds that were technically remarkable yet verged on austere. Now she is filling the frame: 'I like the idea that you can make surfaces be activated,' she said. 'And not just the skin now. It's the entire environment.'
After her grandmother's death, Ojih Odutola found herself not only going over Mrs. Ojih's life story but delving deeper back into the stories of Igbo women before her.
She landed on the Aba Women's Rebellion, a key episode in colonial history when Igbo women, in late 1929 rejected an increase in taxation by the British. A woman named Nwanyeruwa confronted a tax collector who, as the story goes, grabbed her by the throat, prompting the women's mobilization.
In 'Nwanyeruwa (Aba Women's Rebellion),' Ojih Odutola imagines this historical figure as a village elder, bare-chested, facing away from the viewer. She gazes at an oversize rendering of herself, clad in a purple wrap, streaking superhero-like across the backdrop.
She is not the only female icon here. At the entrance of the exhibition's main area, a small portrait of the artist's grandmother, looks over the gallery. We see her bald head and neck in profile, face turned slightly toward the viewer, against yellow, green and beige pastels. She wears a ring high on her ear. Her expression is quiet — possibly judging, yet generous.
The drawing — 'Must She Account for Everything?' — tries to encapsulate the essential reassurance Ojih Odutola carries from her grandmother, she said. 'It's that look of, 'I know you're worried but just go ahead. You're fine, you're OK. Go ahead, I'm behind you.''