Artist Toyin Ojih Odutola Portrays Unconventional Visions Of Black Bodies

Nigerian-born, Alabama-raised artist Toyin Ojih Odutola is a visual storyteller who explores social structures through her characters. Interview Magazine highlights the artist and her approach to portraying blackness.  “I am an investigative artist, so for me the black figure is a medium,” she says. “What I’m trying to do is show you that you can use black bodies in a way that explores ideas, rather than simply the condition of blackness.” Odutola's pen and ink works avoid the usual stylistic portrayal of black skin "by creating figures with bright reflective hues."

In a 2016 solo show at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, she conceived the luxe lives of two fictional Nigerian aristocratic families. Currently, Ojih Odutola has a show of 17 pastel and charcoal drawings at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art that follows these figures as they travel through an ambiguous and shifting global landscape. In one life-size work, Nigerian jungles bleed into Tuscan hills. “So much of the historical narrative has been about black bodies being forced to travel,” she says. “I was trying to see if I could depict an adventurous spirit and a lack of fear about moving through the world, and not being afraid of the space you occupy.”

I was introduced to Odutola's work through writing about the Dana Schutz controversy at the Whitney in 2017 and working on the Doug Jones senate campaign in Alabama.