Ocula Report ART X Lagos: Nigeria’s Art Renaissance 17 November 201817 Nov 2018 : Jareh Das for Ocula Nigeria's art scene has flourished over the last decade, leading to a renewed interest in cultivating and supporting modern and contemporary art in the country. Ranked Africa's largest economy in 2017, making up 0.8 percent of the world's GDP, a surge in wealth amongst some individuals has led to a developing collector base (not to mention rising...
Ocula Conversation Cao Fei Artist Cao Fei's first large-scale institutional exhibition in Asia, A hollow in a world too full (8 September 2018–4 January 2019), is taking place at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, the city's new non-profit art centre housed in a former colonial police and prison complex in Central. Organised in collaboration with Ullens Center for Contemporary Art...
Ocula Report Shanghai's West Bund and Art021 fairs overlap in 2018 17 November 201817 Nov 2018 : Diana d’Arenberg for Ocula The last time I visited West Bund Art & Design was four years ago, when the fair was in its first year of operation: a small, boutique offering held in a cavernous hangar that seemed too big for it. Much has changed since then. Mirroring the rapid development of the city itself, West Bund has grown from 25 galleries in 2014 to a fair that...
Toyin Ojih Odutola is a contemporary artist who focuses on the sociopolitical construct of skin color through her multimedia drawings. Her work explores her personal journey of having been born in Nigeria then moving and assimilating into American culture in conservative Alabama. "I'm doing black on black on black, trying to make it as layered as possible in the deepness of the blackness to bring it out. I noticed the pen became this incredible tool. The black ballpoint [pen] ink on blackboard would become copper tone and I was like 'wow, this isn't even black at all!' The black board was like this balancing platform for the ink to become something else. I instantly recognized this notion, of how we think something is a certain way and in reality it is something else..." Ojih Odutola says in an August 2013 interview about the show, My Country Has No Name in the International Review of African American Art.
When asked why the majority of her figures are black in a recent interview with the Village Voice, Ojih Odutola responded, "Of course they're black figures because they're drawn in black pen, but not all of the figures are of African American descent, or at least the reference isn't. One of the things I like to play with is, "What is black?" Is it because I drew it? Is it because it looks black? Is it because you think the figure is black? Because a lot of it is just a filter, and the filters get more and more obstructed by whatever people think the image is about and not really what it is."
Ojih Odutola has participated in several group shows including Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, Brooklyn Museum (2015), Ballpoint Pen Drawing Since 1950, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2013), Fore, Studio Museum in Harlem (2012), The Moment for Ink, Chinese Cultural Center, San Francisco (2013), and The Progress of Love, Menil Collection, Houston (2012). A recent graduate of the California College of Arts MFA program (2012), Ojih Odutula's work is already in major museum collections including the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL and The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
