TOYIN OJIH ODUTOLA

Early Life

Born in Nigeria to a family of educators, Ojih Odutola relocated to the United States in 1990, first settling in California and later in Alabama. She is of Yoruba and Igbo heritage, a duality that informs her nuanced perspective on identity and belonging. Ojih Odutola earned her BA in Studio Art and Communications from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2008, followed by an MFA in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2012.

Toyin Ojih Odutola Artworks

Ojih Odutola is celebrated for her lush, layered drawings rendered in ballpoint pen, charcoal, pastel, and pencil. Her signature mark-making—complex and sinuous—creates richly textured surfaces that evoke the materiality of skin and landscape.

While many of Ojih Odutola's drawings feature people, she does not consider herself a portraitist. The portrayed individuals are often composites of many people, brought into fictional narratives that span multiple drawings. In her work, Ojih Odutola uses the figure as a vehicle to interrogate broader narratives of race, class, gender, and the legacies of colonialism.

In her work, Ojih Odutola often adopts the role of narrator, archaeologist, or intermediary, inviting viewers to question the boundaries between truth and fiction, image, and text. The pencil, pastel, and charcoal works in To Wander Determined (2017)—the artist's acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—for example, follow two fictional aristocratic Nigerian families, featuring individual and group portraits and regal indoor scenes.

A similarly fictitious world made the backdrop of Ojih Odutola's black-and-white drawings in the installation A Countervailing Theory (2020). In a reversal of conventional Western narrative tropes, the work depicts an ancient civilisation in central Nigeria in which women are not only the ruling class but also the creator.

Influences and Approach

Ojih Odutola has cited artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye as her influences, as well as the portraitist John Singer Sargent. She also draws inspiration from comic books, Japanese manga, and anime, all of which inform her approach to visual storytelling.

For Ojih Odutola, texture is a form of language—a means of communicating the multiplicity of Black experience and the layered realities of her subjects. Her work foregrounds the act of interpretation, both for herself and her viewers, positioning art as a site for questioning, translation, and discovery.

Exhibitions

Ojih Odutola's work has been exhibited internationally at leading institutions.

Solo exhibitions

• Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2025)
• Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2024)
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2022–23)
• Barbican Centre, London (2020)
• Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg (2021)
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017)

Group exhibitions

• Kunstmuseum Basel (2025)
• Nigerian Pavilion, The 60th Venice Biennale (2024)
• National Portrait Gallery, London (2024)
• São Paulo Museum of Art (2018)

FAQs

Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2025