Reimagining Black Experience in the Radical Drawings of Toyin Ojih Odutola
The artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, born in Nigeria and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, is a new kind of visual storyteller. Right now she’s deep into making drawings of the final chapter of a fictional trilogy she has written about two Nigerian families. One is an ancient noble clan, the other more recently enriched by trade and vineyards. The families have been joined by marriage between the two principal male heirs, Jideofor and Temitope. (Jideofor, the second son, became the heir apparent when his older brother was killed by a hyena.)
“It started as a story I was writing, with random drawings,” Toyin tells me. It became an extended pictorial narrative “about wealth and nobility, and the sort of self-possession and ownership of capital that surrounds you, instead of you being the capital.” In other words, it’s a meditation on what might have been possible in Africa if colonial conquest had never happened.
Toyin’s saga has already led to solo exhibitions at the Whitney and three other museums in the form of richly colored, large-scale, exuberant portrait drawings supposedly “borrowed” from the collections of both families – drawings, not paintings, because drawing is Toyin’s primary medium.When “A Matter of Fact,” the first group of these works, was shown at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora in late 2016, the Berkeley historian Leigh Raiford, writing in Artforum, said that it “allows us to witness an artist testing new ideas and stretching her craft, testing and stretching the boundaries of blackness in the process.” Unlike Kehinde Wiley or Titus Kaphar, who insert an African American subject into an Old Master–style painting to give identity to the black figure, Toyin imagines a contemporary world in which blackness is the norm. She’s more like the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, who has said, “I’m trying to make my shit as black as possible and still have you deal with my humanity.”
Toyin, 33, is a striking beauty with a shaved head, a barely visible gold nose ring, and many delicate tattoos on her bare arms. She’s outspoken, direct, and full of humor and joie de vivre—her sentences often end in bursts of laughter. She has two modest-size studios (no studio assistant) in an artist-friendly former factory building in midtown Manhattan. On the tenth floor is “the incubator,” where she prowls the internet, streams TV and movies (she loved Black Panther), reads books, writes, and draws more or less constantly. Her work owes a lot to Japanese art and anime, comic books, and graphic novels, but with Toyin, the written word leads irrevocably to picture making. (She doesn’t let anybody read her writings.) Her sixth-floor studio is “sacred ground,” she says, laughing, the place where drawings come when (and if) they’re ready to advance to the next stage. Against the wall is a ten-foot-wide diptych, the largest she’s ever attempted, with the outlines of nine life-size figures sketched in pencil. “This is Temitope’s whole family,” she says. “Jideofor’s family is going to have a diptych, as well, but not as big. Every aristocratic family has a formal portrait, right?”
If all goes well, both drawings will be among 30 or so on view this September at the Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea. Shainman took Toyin on when she was a graduate student at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and gave her her first solo show in 2011. With its panoply of individual black faces against white backgrounds, drawn in layers and layers of ink from a ballpoint pen, it established her as a brilliant innovator in the depiction of black skin.
At a residency in Sausalito in 2016, says Toyin, “I started playing with soft pastel and charcoal on a large scale, and all of a sudden I began writing this story.” It set off an avalanche of drawings, much larger than any she had done before—not just of the characters’ heads but of their bodies, clothes, and surroundings, capturing patterns and textures with the marvelously fluid lines and colors that pastels make possible, using her fingers instead of brushes.
She’s having lots of fun reinventing the idea of nineteenth-century family portraits, which she’s always loved – John Singer Sargent is an idol of hers, and James Tissot’s 1868 The Circle of the Rue Royale inspired the big group portrait she’s working on. In Toyin’s drawings, however, the subjects are relaxed, casual, at leisure, caught in the moment as if in a snapshot rather than formally posed. The gay, newlywed heirs—there’s irony here, since in Nigeria homosexuality is illegal—slouch with untucked shirts and open collars. The technical virtuosity and the boldly inventive use of color pull you into the story: a Netflix series in the making.
“We simply do not see drawings executed at this level very often, and especially not by someone who was born in 1985,” says Whitney Museum assistant curator Rujeko Hockley, who organized Toyin’s show there last October. “Her hand, her sense of color and material, her understanding of composition, of what to reveal and what to hide—they’re all exquisite.”
Other unfinished works in the studio show different family members. “There’s a cousin, Toyin says, “being kind of cheeky in her short robe, and that’s a portrait of her disapproving grandmother on the wall in back of her. The cousin is an interior decorator, and she knows she’s hot! Her grandmother is going”—haughty accent—“ ‘Really? Just showing yourself to these people?’ ” Toyin roars with laughter, slapping her thigh with one hand. “I know these characters. I’ve lived with them for three years now.”
Toyin was born in Ife, an ancient Yoruba city in South Western Nigeria. The political situation there was volatile, so in 1990, her mother, Nelene Ojih, took her and her two-year-old brother, Datun, to join their father, J. Adeola Odutola, who was at Berkeley to do research and teach chemistry at the university.
“My father is Yoruba, and my mother is Igbo,” Toyin says. “And if you know anything about the Biafran War, they were the warring tribes right after independence. Thanks, Britain! I love Nigerian women because they’re so confident and self-assured. My mom’s a nurse, but she has a degree in comparative literature, and she’s really great with words. She’s also great with shade.”
Because she’s Nigerian, that shade, says Toyin, “is much deeper than you get in the American South. When I was growing up, our household was very patriarchal. People were happy when I was born, but when my brother was born, the whole village was involved. My father would tell my brother, ‘You have to do this or that because you’re carrying my name.’ My mom would take me aside and say, ‘I don’t care what your father says, you’re carrying my name. You got the Ojih.’ ” In 2015, Toyin officially added the “Ojih” to “Odutola.”
After four years in Berkeley, the family moved to Huntsville, where her father had been offered a tenure-track job at the historically black Alabama A & M University. The prospect terrified nine-year-old Toyin. “I’m an immigrant kid,” she explains, who learned her first words of English when she arrived in the U.S., “and I was only taught about slavery and Martin Luther King and the Birmingham Riots a few days before we left, at school in Berkeley, and now this crazy place called Alabama was about to be my home.” Just before leaving, trying to lift Toyin’s spirits, her mom bought her a Lion King coloring book—a big deal because they were virtually broke. Toyin lived in its pages throughout the cross-country drive in a U-Haul van. “That was when art became my central focus,” she remembers. She bonded with Timon, the meerkat, copying his face on napkins, scraps of paper, hotel pads, and every other available surface. “Even now, as an adult, I’m Timon,” she says. “No one listens to Timon, but he’s the only one with common sense. He’s ironic. He’s sardonic. He plays tricks. He throws shade. I just loved his character.”
Although Huntsville was by then a major center for the U.S. Army’s space-and-rocket program, Alabama was still a deep South state, and the Odutola children were exposed for the first time to racial taunts and bullying. “It was a crash course,” Toyin says. “Your blackness and your otherness are in your face every day in the lunchroom and at recess. It was a three-tiered view of life: You’re already a foreigner in America. And now, among African Americans, you’re African, which is another strike against you. And even in your own family, you’re not the same—you’re starting to become more Americanized.”
Art was her escape in this troubled sea. She drew all the time. “I was obsessed,” she tells me, “capturing everything I saw and being fascinated with the incredibly simple task of looking at something and transmitting it onto paper. It’s an immediate magic.”
Her high school art teacher saw Toyin’s talent, made her the first student in an advanced art program, and introduced her to the work of black artists and writers, including Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker. She went on to major in studio art and communications at the University of Alabama. Her art teacher there nominated her for Yale’s summer art residency in Norfolk, Connecticut. The rest of the faculty were against it, says Toyin, because she had been tagged as a troublemaker (“I’ve got a mouth on me,” she admits). But her teacher fought hard, and she was accepted.
“It was the worst experience of my life,” Toyin says, “because the way they talked to artists of color was really racist. The last week I was there, I was told that I should probably change my major. I remember just thinking, Fuck you. I’m going to prove you wrong.”
She didn’t apply to Yale’s graduate art school as a result but says, “I’m glad I went to Norfolk and had a taste of what I’m living now, which is people who take art-making very seriously.” Her parents, worried that she could never make a living through art, wanted her to go law school. Instead, she won a full scholarship to California College of the Arts, where she received her MFA degree—and where she was studying when Jack Shainman saw her ballpoint-pen drawings. “My socks rolled up and down without my touching them,” Shainman tells me. “That’s always the key sign for me. I think we purchased every single one.”
Toyin moved to New York in 2013, and her rise has been meteoric: museum exhibitions, four more shows at Jack Shainman, and inclusion in Manifesta 12, the international nomadic biennial that is in Palermo this year. There’s a waiting list for her drawings, some of which startle and perplex viewers. Her 2015 exhibition at Shainman’s included The Treatment, portrait heads of 43 prominent white men (Prince Charles, Leonardo Di Caprio, J. Edgar Hoover, Martin Amis, Picasso, Benedict Cumberbatch) who have been robbed of their whiteness (i.e., their “importance”) because their faces are black, rendered in many layers of lustrous ballpoint-pen ink.
She lives in Brooklyn but still spends most of her waking hours in her Manhattan studios—she’s nocturnal and often works through the night there. Toyin travels extensively. She went back to Nigeria with her mother for the first time when she was sixteen and has returned often. She’s spent time in Tokyo, Florence, London, Albuquerque, Joshua Tree, Johannesburg, Lagos, and other far-flung places, and the iPhone photos she takes on her trips often work their way into her drawings. She stays fit with a mostly vegetarian diet and by dancing to Afrobeat, highlife, and electronic music, and doing lots of squats and other exercises in her studio—no time for the gym and apparently no room for romance. Although she cheerfully declined to talk with me about her private life, I could hardly ignore the large Hello Love text drawing on the wall of her studio, a hilariously obscene and somewhat violent flushagram to an ex-boyfriend.
“That’s a joke,” she tells me. “I nearly sent it to a person who was being an F-Boy.”
Since her Whitney show, some people have criticized Toyin for depicting wealth as the solution to black problems. “That’s never been my aim,” she says. “I use wealth as a platform. I’m analyzing it, usurping it, playing with it, the way I would with blackness, the way I would with skin, the way I would do with stories. I think some people thought I was disregarding the work and suffering of black people. It’s not disrespect. I just don’t want to be an artist who only depicts black pain.
“I understand that this is a significant part of black life around the globe,” she continues, “but if all we’re known for is our pain and our struggle, what does that say? I don’t want young people to feel that is the only way they can talk about themselves, through that lens. Black stories can be ridiculous. Black stories can be silly. They can be problematic. They can be mediocre and remarkable. They can be boring. Can we have that privilege now? Instead of having to be exceptional all the time? That was the aim of this whole saga—just to see that.”
In this story:
Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
Hair: Edris Nichols; Makeup: Renee Garnes.
