Toyin Ojih Odutola is a Nigerian-American artist acclaimed for her intricate drawings and works on paper. Renowned for her innovative mark-making and narrative approach, Ojih Odutola's practice reimagines the possibilities of portraiture and storytelling, exploring themes of identity, socio-economic structures, and the complexities of representation.
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.
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.
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.
Ojih Odutola's work has been exhibited internationally at leading institutions.
She was born in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, in 1985.
Ojih Odutola is known for her use of ballpoint pen, charcoal, pastel, chalk, and pencil on paper.
Her work investigates identity, race, class, gender, migration, the legacy of colonialism, and the construction of narratives.
Key solo exhibitions of works by Ojih Odutola include Ilé Oriaku, Kunsthalle Basel (2024); A Countervailing Theory, Barbican Centre, London (2020); and To Wander Determined, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017).
Ojih Odutola frequently constructs fictional narratives, sometimes adopting the role of narrator or archaeologist, to challenge viewers' assumptions and invite multiple interpretations.
Ojih Odutola's work can be viewed at her representing gallery, Jack Shainman Gallery (New York). Her works are also in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Toyin is pronounced 'TOY-in', 'Ojih' as 'OH-jee', and 'Odutola' as 'OH-doo-TOH-lah'.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2025
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