Precious Okoyomon

Last updated

Precious Okoyomon
Born1993
London, England
NationalityNigerian-American
Known for Conceptual art, poetry
Notable workEarthseed, Ajebota, A Drop of Sun Under the Earth

Precious Okoyomon (born 1993) is a Nigerian-American artist, poet, and chef. They live and work in New York City.

Contents

Early life and education

Okoyomon was born in London, England in 1993. At age eleven, they moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. Okoyomon attended the great books school Shimer college in Chicago where they studied pataphysics, or the physics of the imagination. While still in college, Okoyomon worked at the three star Michelin restaurant Alinea for two years. For their thesis presentation at school, Okoyomon hosted a series of experimental dinners that featured dishes like rock soup, and had guests dine under hanging rope nooses. [1]

Work and career

Okoyomon's multidisciplinary practice investigates the racialization of the natural world, Christianity, intimacy, and ideas and experiences of life, death and time. [2] [3] Their installations, sculptures, performances, and poetry often draw from their family history as well as their encounters with queerness and the internet, and frequently return to figures like the angel, the sun, and trees as visual and conceptual motifs. [2] [3]

Okoyomon has had institutional solo exhibitions at the MMK in Frankfurt and the LUMA Westbau in Zurich, and group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, and in 2018 were included in the 13th Baltic Triennial. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Okoyomon participated in Hans Ulrich Obrist's 2018 Work Marathon, and has read their poetry at The Kitchen, The Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1, Hauser and Wirth, The KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Artists Space, and The Poetry Project, performing alongside Eileen Myles, Samuel Delany, and John Giorno. [9] [5] [10] In 2019, Okoyomon was nominated for the Paulo Cunha E Silva Art Prize and was included in Cultured Magazine's "30 under 35" list of notable emerging artists. [11] [12]

Ajebota (2016)

Taking its title from a Youraba word meaning "spoiled rich kid," Okoyomon's first book of poetry, published by Bottlecap Press in 2016, explores the complexities of their identity as a black queer immigrant inhabiting a specific class position. [13] The book which often makes use of internet shorthand and text abbreviation, frequently steals from the work of other poets, and ends with a poem composed of screenshots of a text conversation engages the challenges of writing and reading poetry in the digital age. [14] The book which has been interpreted as a response to Alt Lit, cites Dana Ward, Hannah Black, Juliana Huxtable, Bhanu Kapil, Simone White, and Fred Moten among its many influences. [15]

I Need Help (2018)

For Okoyomon's first art exhibition, they collaborated with Hannah Black at the New York Gallery Real Fine Arts on a sequel to Black's 2017 show "Some Context" commissioned by the Chisenhale Gallery in London, where Black filled the exhibition space with 20,000 copies of a book they produced entitled "The Situation" composed of interviews Black conducted with friends about a situation but where each explicit mention of what the situation is was redacted. [16] In "I Need Help," as in "Some Context," many of the copies of the book were shredded. For Okoyomon's contribution to the show, they made a series of dolls consisting of raw wool bound by yarn. In a press release written by Okoyomon and Black, they propose that the exhibition "gestures towards a politics or aesthetics based on the underlying and frankly disgusting processes of rot and collapse that have produced the dirt from which everything grows. [17]

Making Me Blush (2018)

In a two person exhibition at Quinn Harrelson / Current Projects, with the artist Puppies Puppies, Okoyomon presented their first large scale sculpture. In the piece, which re-stages the iconographic lynching trees of the American south, Okoyomon, hung a grouping of stuffed animals made to resemble angels, by the addition of taxidermied bird wings, from rope nooses attached to the limbs of a large live tree planted in a mound of soil. Conflating an esoteric Christian interpretation of an angel as a creature without life and without death, and theories of social death and slavery in the black radical tradition, Okoyomon constructed an artwork that models a complex notion of black life, by contrasting the physical impossibility of killing an angel from hanging, because the winged creature can always fly upwards to escape the pull of gravity, with the conceptual impossibility of living a life where one always has to fly just to stay alive. [18] Okoyomon suggests that "black life is a mere mobilization of death." [5] In an interview with Okoyomon at the 2019 DLD Conference in Munich, Hans Ulrich Obrist called the exhibition "an absolute highlight of 2018." [19] Okoyomon's work from the exhibition is now included in the permanent collection of the Rubell Museum. [3]

A Drop of Sun Under the Earth (2019)

Okoyomon's first institutional solo exhibition mounted at the LUMA Westbau in Zurich in collaboration with The Serpentine Galleries in 2019, curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, continued the artist's exploration of history of the intersection of race and ideas about nature, light, life and death, and architecture. The show, building upon gestures first made in Making Me Blush the previous year, presents a forest of the artist's lynching tree sculptures in the museum's Heimo Zobernig designed schwarzescafé space. In an installation piece entitled "Frenzied Sun," Okoyomon created a machine that uses the gallery's air conditioning system to circulate cotton and cottonwood seeds through the space like snow. [2] The show includes Okoyomon's first video work entitled "It's Disassociating Season," which was projected in the space and played on loop. Running for nine and a half minutes, the single channel video follows an animated bear smoking a blunt in the woods while a recording of the artist's brother recounting the times he was almost shot during encounters with the American police plays. In the film, a sun countenanced by the cartoon face of a black child swings in and out of view. The work intends to open up a conversation about racialized understandings of evil through tragic comedy. In another architectural intervention, Okoyomon has placed spheres made of black resin and cotton over the existing lighting features in the space. The work references to the Lantern Laws, an 18th century legal code that required black, mixed race, and indigenous people to carry lanterns if they were walking about New York City after sunset without the company of a white person. The show's press release, following the scholarship of Simone Browne, argues "the Lantern Laws lay[ed] the foundation for modern surveillance" and their existence reveals the long "history of the criminalization...of light, darkness, and the sun (which Okoyomon believes to be indisputably black)" [5] The exhibition's title is taken from a Frantz Fanon's quotation from White Skin Black Masks, where the political philosopher and clinical psychiatrist offers people are “black, not because of a curse, but because [their] skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia...a drop of sun under the earth.” [5] Reviewer's noted Okoyomon's exhibition's engagement with Black studies Scholar Christina Sharpe's notion that anti-blackness is the weather, forwarded in her book "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being." [18]

The End of The World (2019)

In Okoyomon's first play, commissioned for Serpentine Galleries's 2019 Cos X Park Night Series, curated by Claude Adjil, the artist cast four black women to play angels who have fallen to earth to initiate the reckoning. [3] Performed in the Kensington Gardens Junya Ishigami Serpentine Architecture Pavilion, the play featured costumes made by Fabian Kis-Juhasz and a score written by Yves B. Golden. [3]

Earthseed (2020)

Curated by Susanne Pfeffer, at the MMK in Frankfurt, Earthseed is Okoyomon's first institutional solo exhibition in Germany and their largest show to date. The exhibition's title is the name of a fictional religion in Octavia E. Butler’s books Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, that proposes "the Earth’s seed can be transplanted anywhere and, through adaptation, will survive." Like the imagined religion, Okoyomon's exhibition envisions a "theology of mutation, flux, and motion."In a piece called "resistance is an atmospheric condition," Okoyomon filled the gallery space with the Japanese vine Kudzu. Responding to the gallery building's history as a passport office, Okoyomon used the invasive plant as an artwork to comment on ideas about immigration, invasion, race, and what is allowed to be considered natural. [20] The show's press release recounts how Kudzu was first imported to the American South in 1876 with the intention that when planted its roots would strengthen the ecosystem's soil which as result of the excessive over cultivation of cotton by chattel slaves during the period was threatened by wide spread erosion. While the vine in some respects served its intended purpose and remains even today a foundational and necessary bulwark against the dissolution of the region's soil, the speed at which the vine was able to grow, when removed from its original planting and its natural predators, allowed it to consume massive tracts of land earning it the name "the vine that ate the south." Soon, growing or planting of Kudzu was made a criminal offense in many states. Okoyomon suggests that despite the fact that vine's "specific history as a failed remedy for the monumental toll slavery took on the ecological system of the American South has been largely forgotten," Kudzu might serve as a metaphor for Blackness itself, which like the plant, became monstrous when removed from its home in Africa and was taken to the states, where it functioned simultaneously as "indispensable to and irreconcilable with Western civilization." The show also includes six large scale sculptures, made out of raw wool, modeled after the dolls Okoyomon first exhibited in their first collaborative exhibition "I Need Help" with Hannah Black. [4] [21] Hannah Black wrote an essay for the exhibition's accompanying booklet. [22]

Reviewing the show for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Stefan Trinks writes that the show is one of "those exhibitions, that despite [its] metabolic fullness, creates clarity." Trinks offers that Okoyomon's particular identity as an African immigrant to the United States might serve as a key to understanding the exhibition's complicated but perspicuous understanding of global Blackness, and the feelings of alienation and displacement that come along with navigating it. [21]

Spiral Theory Test Kitchen (2018-ongoing)

In 2018, Okoyomon, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, and Quori Theodor, formed Spiral Theory Test Kitchen. In 2019, Rachel Hahn profiled "self-described collaborative queer cooking collective" and the experimental dishes they create, for Vogue Magazine, calling their meals "mind-altering." [1] Other critics have noted the influence of BDSM, theories of quantum entanglement, Donna Haraway's scholarship, queer experience, language poetry, and Okoyomon's Nigerian upbringing on the group's psychosexual cuisine. [23] In an article published by Eater, actress Indya Moore is quoted after eating a dinner made by the collective saying that “this is the most queer, trans, gender non-conforming food I’ve ever had in my whole life,” and joking “if you eat this food, it will deconstruct your toxic masculinity.” . [24] For the Fashion designer Telfar's autumn/winter 2020 show at Florence’s Pitti Uomo, models were sent down a circular runway that doubled as a dining table for a meal prepared and envisioned by Spiral Theory Test Kitchen. [24]

But Did U Die? (2020)

Okoyomon's second book "But Did U Die?" will be published by Wonder Press in 2020. [25] In an advanced blurb for the book by Eileen Myles, they write "Precious is every kind of artist but [they] could only be a poet. [Their] ‘also’ barges into every world, [Their] work is pure manifesto, stopping to laugh, it’s bawdy and pretty, handsome, cataclysmic and righteous. It’s food. It’s impatient and entirely on [their] own time and I think [they] touch ours, everyone else’s, in a burn the earth Jimi Hendrix way. No, [they're] post him. The earth is burnt. [They] start there." [26]

Influences and inspirations

Okoyomon's practice has been influenced by the work of Pope L., Adrian Piper, Eileen Myles, Arthur Jafa, Pierre Huyghe, Anicka Yi, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. In an article in Artsy, Anicka Yi recognized Okoyomon as one of the female artists who deserves the art world's attention, calling Okoyomon "brilliant" and writing that she "believes [Okoyomon] is expanding the boundaries of what art can be." [27] In a conversation at Art Basel Miami on Artist's influences, moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Okoyomon and Rirkrit Tiravanija spoke about the inspiration they have had on each others work. [28]

Controversy

In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Okoyomon signed a letter on Artforum that was criticized for being antisemitic, [29] [30] as it intentionally did not mention the terrorist organization Hamas or the Israelis who were killed. [31] The letter received more than 8,000 signatures. Many in the art world condemned the petition and its signers for its antisemitism. [32]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serpentine Galleries</span> Art gallery in Hyde Park, London

The Serpentine Galleries are two contemporary art galleries in Kensington Gardens, Westminster, Greater London. Recently rebranded to just Serpentine, the organisation is split across Serpentine South, previously known as the Serpentine Gallery, and Serpentine North, previously known as the Sackler Gallery. The gallery spaces are within five minutes' walk of each other, linked by the bridge over the Serpentine Lake from which the galleries get their names. Their exhibitions, architecture, education and public programmes attract up to 1.2 million visitors a year. Admission to both galleries is free. The CEO is Bettina Korek, and the artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eileen Myles</span> Writer (born 1949)

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow, which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles uses they/them pronouns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moscow Biennale</span>

The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art is one of the most important Russian cultural events and was founded in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Ulrich Obrist</span> Swiss art curator, critic and historian (born 24/5/1968)

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a Swiss art curator, critic, and art historian. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is also co-editor of the Cahiers d'Art review. He lives and works in London.

David Robbins is an American artist and writer who was one of the first to investigate the art world's entrance into the culture industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imtiaz Dharker</span> Pakistani-born British poet, artist, and video film maker

Imtiaz Dharker is a Pakistani-born British poet, artist, and video film maker. She won the Queen's Gold Medal for her English poetry and was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University from January 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Hiorns</span> British Contemporary artist (born 1975)

Roger Hiorns is a British artist based in London. His primary media is sculpture and installation, using a wide variety of materials, including metals, wood and plastics. He also works in the media of video and photography.

Wade Guyton is an American post-conceptual artist who among other things makes digital paintings on canvas using scanners and digital inkjet technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Birnbaum</span> Swedish art curator and critic

Daniel Birnbaum is a Swedish art curator and an art critic. Since 2019, he has been director and curator of Acute Art in London, UK.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfe von Lenkiewicz</span> British artist

Wolfe von Lenkiewicz is a British artist known for his artistic reconfigurations of well-known imageries from art history and visual culture to create ambiguous compositions that question art historical discourses. He lives and works in London.

Susan Hefuna is a German-Egyptian visual artist. She works in a variety of media, including drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, video and performance. She lives and works between Cairo, Egypt and Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oscar Murillo (artist)</span> Colombian artist

Oscar Murillo is a Colombian artist working within the painting tradition. He currently lives and works in various locations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yana Peel</span>

Yana Peel is a Russian-born Canadian executive, businesswoman, children's author and philanthropist, who is global head of arts and culture at French fashion house Chanel. She was CEO of the Serpentine Galleries from 2016 to 2019 and previously a board member.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ed Atkins</span> British contemporary artist

Ed Atkins is a British contemporary artist best known for his video art and poetry. He is currently based in Cophenhagen. Atkins lectures at University of Fine Arts Hamburg, in past at Goldsmiths College in London and has been referred to as "one of the great artists of our time" by the Swiss curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

This is a bibliography for Hans-Ulrich Obrist, a Swiss art curator, critic and historian of art. He currently lives in London.

Ian Cheng is an American contemporary artist known for his "virtual ecosystem" live-simulated digital artworks. His artworks explore the capacity of living agents to deal with change, and are "less about the wonders of new technologies than about the potential for these tools to realize ways of relating to a chaotic existence." His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Venice Biennale, Leeum Museum and other institutions.

Joseph Grigely is an American visual artist and scholar. His work is primarily conceptual and engages a variety of media forms including sculpture, video, and installations. Grigely was included in two Whitney Biennials, and is also a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Hannah Black is a British visual artist, critic, and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance.

Amira Gad is an art curator, writer, and editor in modern and contemporary art and architecture. She's currently Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Previously, she was Curator at Large at KANAL - Centre Pompidou in Brussels, Head of Programs at LAS Art Foundation in Berlin (2020-2023), curator at the Serpentine Galleries in London (2014-2020), and Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam (2009-2014). She's Egyptian, born in France and grew up in Saudi Arabia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">P. Staff</span> British contemporary artist

P. Staff is a contemporary visual and performance artist.

References

  1. 1 2 Hahn, Rachel. "Spiral Theory Test Kitchen Wants to Change the Way You Taste". Vogue Magazine. Retrieved September 25, 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 Burke, Harry. "Precious Okoyomon: The Joy of Being" (PDF). Kaleidoscope. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "COS x Serpentine Park Nights 2019: Precious Okoyomon, The End of the World". The Serpentine Galleries. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  4. 1 2 "Precious Okoyomon: Earthseed". Museum Für Moderne Kunst. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Harrelson, Quinn. "Precious Okoyomon - A Drop of Sun Under The Earth". LUMA Westbau Zurich. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  6. ↑ "It's Urgent". Kunstrhal Charlottenberg. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  7. ↑ "I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker" (PDF). ICA London. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  8. ↑ "Give Up The Ghost. Baltic Triennial". Cura Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  9. ↑ "Time Square Red, Time Square Blue 20th Anniversary Event". Brown Paper Tickets. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  10. ↑ "Work Marathon". The Serpentine Galleries. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  11. ↑ "PCS Art Prize". PCS Art Prize. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  12. ↑ Karp-Evans, Elizabeth. "Precious Okoyomon finds New Space for Radical Thought". Cultured Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  13. ↑ Bess, Gaby. "Making Art as Immigrant Black Women in America". Vice.
  14. ↑ Fama, Ben. "Ben Fama Meets Up With Precious Okoyomon in Queen Mob's Tea House". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved September 25, 2020.
  15. ↑ Staff, Harriet. "The Creative Independent Interviews Precious Okoyomon". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved September 25, 2020.
  16. ↑ Sasmor, Emily. "I Need Help, Hannah Black & Precious Okoyomon @ Real Fine Arts". Topical Cream Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  17. ↑ "Hannah Black and Precious Okoyomon at Real Fine Arts". Contemporary Art Daily. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  18. 1 2 Arturo Abreu, Manuel. "Precious Okoyomon". Cura Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  19. ↑ Obrist, Hans Ulrich. "Art Talk II (Precious Okoyomon, Artist & Writer, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Galleries)". Youtube. DLDconference. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  20. ↑ Lang, Colin. "Views Precious Okoyomon: Earthseed". Spike Art Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  21. 1 2 Trinks, Stefan. "Plants in the Customs Office: Southern American Ecosystem". Frankfurter Allegmeine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  22. ↑ Okoyomon, Precious (September 26, 2020). "Earthseed Bookled" (PDF).
  23. ↑ Dunn, Frankie. "This queer cooking collective hosts psychosexual dinner parties". I-D Tech. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  24. 1 2 Ling, Isabel. "'If You Eat This Food, It Will Deconstruct Your Toxic Masculinity'". Eater. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  25. ↑ Brown, Indya. "They Seem Cool: The Poet Who Took a Vow of Silence As a Child Meet Precious Okoyomon". The Cut New York Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  26. ↑ Myles, Eileen. "Collected Blurbs". Eileen Myles. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  27. ↑ Yi, Anicka. "The Women Artists Who Deserve Our Attention, According to 9 Leading Artists". Artsy. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  28. ↑ "Conversations | Artist's Influencers". YouTube.
  29. ↑ Community, Art (October 22, 2023). "Both Should Come Together". ערב רב Erev Rav. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
  30. ↑ "An Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations". Artforum. October 19, 2023. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
  31. ↑ Einspruch, Franklin (November 1, 2023). "Look Who's Suddenly Interested in Free Speech". Substack. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
  32. ↑ Small, Zachary (October 27, 2023). "Artists Call for Boycott After Artforum Fires Its Top Editor". The New York Times. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.