Precious Okoyomon
Precious Okoyomon | |
---|---|
Born | 1993 London, England |
Nationality | Nigerian-American |
Known for | Conceptual art, poetry |
Notable work | Earthseed, 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.
Early life and education
Okoyomon was born in
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
Ajebota (2016)
Taking its title from a
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
Earthseed (2020)
Curated by
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,
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
References
- ^ a b Hahn, Rachel. "Spiral Theory Test Kitchen Wants to Change the Way You Taste". Vogue Magazine. Retrieved September 25, 2020.
- ^ a b c Burke, Harry. "Precious Okoyomon: The Joy of Being" (PDF). Kaleidoscope. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ a b c d e "COS x Serpentine Park Nights 2019: Precious Okoyomon, The End of the World". The Serpentine Galleries. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ a b "Precious Okoyomon: Earthseed". Museum Für Moderne Kunst. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ a b c d e Harrelson, Quinn. "Precious Okoyomon - A Drop of Sun Under The Earth". LUMA Westbau Zurich. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ "It's Urgent". Kunstrhal Charlottenberg. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ "I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker" (PDF). ICA London. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ "Give Up The Ghost. Baltic Triennial". Cura Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ "Time Square Red, Time Square Blue 20th Anniversary Event". Brown Paper Tickets. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ "Work Marathon". The Serpentine Galleries. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ "PCS Art Prize". PCS Art Prize. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ Karp-Evans, Elizabeth. "Precious Okoyomon finds New Space for Radical Thought". Cultured Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ Bess, Gaby. "Making Art as Immigrant Black Women in America". Vice.
- ^ Fama, Ben. "Ben Fama Meets Up With Precious Okoyomon in Queen Mob's Tea House". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved September 25, 2020.
- ^ Staff, Harriet. "The Creative Independent Interviews Precious Okoyomon". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved September 25, 2020.
- ^ Sasmor, Emily. "I Need Help, Hannah Black & Precious Okoyomon @ Real Fine Arts". Topical Cream Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ "Hannah Black and Precious Okoyomon at Real Fine Arts". Contemporary Art Daily. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ a b Arturo Abreu, Manuel. "Precious Okoyomon". Cura Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ Obrist, Hans Ulrich. "Art Talk II (Precious Okoyomon, Artist & Writer, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Galleries)". Youtube. DLDconference. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ Lang, Colin. "Views Precious Okoyomon: Earthseed". Spike Art Magazine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ a b Trinks, Stefan. "Plants in the Customs Office: Southern American Ecosystem". Frankfurter Allegmeine. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ Okoyomon, Precious (September 26, 2020). "Earthseed Bookled" (PDF).
- ^ Dunn, Frankie. "This queer cooking collective hosts psychosexual dinner parties". I-D Tech. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ a b Ling, Isabel. "'If You Eat This Food, It Will Deconstruct Your Toxic Masculinity'". Eater. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Myles, Eileen. "Collected Blurbs". Eileen Myles. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ Yi, Anicka. "The Women Artists Who Deserve Our Attention, According to 9 Leading Artists". Artsy. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
- ^ "Conversations | Artist's Influencers". YouTube.