NEW YORK: Toyin Odutola

Toyin Odutola artwork via jackshainman.com.

Like the Sea

May 1 – 31, 2014

Opening reception: Thursday, May 1, 2014, 6 – 8PM

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

524 West 24^th Street

New York, NY

From jackshainman.com: 

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Like the Sea, an exhibition of new large-scale drawings and Toyin Odutola’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The show marks a new direction for Odutola as she moves away from the strict use of pen ink into the dense layering of pastels and charcoal while positioning her subjects amidst settings of rich textiles and graphic backdrops.   

Like the Sea is composed entirely of male subjects, specifically Odutola’s two younger brothers, surrounded by tapestried landscapes indicative of the diverse locales in which the siblings have lived. The shifting of context is an important motif in Odutola's work, and represents the impermanence of “home” as an emotional and physical sense of belonging. Having lived in culturally divergent regions of Nigeria and the United States at young ages, the siblings looked to each other to find that sense of “home” wherever they were. Delving into ideas of presence and placement while expressing the personal attachment Odutola has for her brothers, her interests become simultaneously intimate and universal. They are full of contradictions that further speak to what love is.   

Through the language of color, pattern and rhythmic mark-making, Odutola carves out abstract locales for Like the Sea in which her brothers, reclining and sitting, can exist in without forced engagement or any effect on their disposition. Odutola states, “My family and I have constantly been affected by the places we have lived and in so doing have adjusted ourselves to every context. It's something I have carried with me into adulthood—this application of compromising oneself to fit my surroundings—and my brothers as well. This is not something we view as strange anymore, having to change yourself or your nature to mold it into each and every context we find ourselves in.” In Like the Sea, Odutola made it a point to portray her brothers “as they are” in the graphically differing spaces. She explains:   

“It was important for me to have them just be, to look like they weren't changing themselves for anyone—not even me. The series title was inspired by an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), where Hurston writes, "Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore. 

I was interested in creating a narrative that was ambiguous to any sort of over-arching, direct definition, while emphasizing this idea of creating these drawings as, in and of itself, an act of love. For me the theme of 'love' in this series is two-fold: it is in the idea of shifting changes as well as in act of doing. It can change, but the beauty of it is when it is consistently present even when everything else feels uncertain.”

Toyin Odutola was born in Nigeria and currently lives and works in New York City. Her most recent solo exhibition was Toyin Odutola: The Constant Wrestler, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA), Indiana, 2013-2014. Odutola’s extensive group exhibitions most recently include southXeast: southeastern contemporary art, Schmidt Center Gallery and Ritter Art Gallery, Florida, 2014; I See You: The Politics of Being, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Art, North Carolina, 2014; The Six Draughtsmen, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), New York, 2013-2014; The Progress of Love, Menil Collection, Texas, 2012-2013 and Ballpoint Pen Drawing Since 1950, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut, 2013. She will be attending printmaking residencies at the Tamarind Institute, New Mexico and Flying Horse Editions, Florida in 2014 and at the Fountainhead Residency, Miami, Florida in 2015. She was the recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship Award in 2011 and the Erzulie Veasey Johnson Painting & Drawing Award in 2008.  

Exhibit Link

IN PRINT: Toyin Odutola / Modern Painters / April 2014

Toyin Odutola photographed in 2011 by Brannan McGill. 

Portraits of the Artist

Toyin Odutola’s rich figures

Text | Michael Slenske

Excerpt: 

As an early adopter of Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, Odutola has embraced social media in a way few artists have. At the same time, she’s also grown weary of the brazenness some of her followers exhibit on her feeds. “The social media bit is really about documenting process. I like the dialogue if it’s constructive, but I’m not at a crossroads. I’ve accumulated a lot of followers, and it’s great, but I’m also at the teetering point where people are feeling themselves a little too much, commenting a little too much,” says Odutola, noting some followers who’ve attempted to weigh in a bit too emphatically on color choices and themes in her works. “I just feel like that’s not what I’m doing this for, and if they don’t stop I’ll just get off it.”

Toyin Odutola, Hold It In Your Mouth a Little Longer, 2013. Charcoal, pastel, and graphite on paper, 40 x 30 inches.

To read complete story and see more images pick up a copy of the April 2014 issue of Modern Painters on newsstands now. 

ON VIEW: I SEE YOU: The Politics of Being

January 26- June 1, 2014

THE HARVEY B. GANTT CENTER FOR AFRICAN-AMERICANARTS + CULTURE

Levine Center for the Arts

551 South Tryon Street

Charlotte, NC

Featured artists include ruby onyinyechia manze, Endia Beal, Michaela Pilar Brown, WandaRaimundi-Ortiz, Toyin Odutola and Alexandria Smith

This exhibition presents the work of six contemporary artists who expand the constructs of female identity in the 21st century. Surveying the range of ideas and illusions of the feminine mystique, this exhibition explores how women of the African Diaspora are seen, from their perspective and through the eyes of others. Juxtaposing historical ideologies and the contemporary, and self-presentation and imposed representation, the viewer is centered within a global community of image making and identity from a female perspective. Whether through implications of the body, or figurative representations of women, this mixed-media exhibition explores the artists' desires to deconstruct and redefine history, identity and culture.

This exhibition was organized by the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture.

Exhibit Link

Photographer Endia Bea studies minority women in corporate environments

COVER: Toyin Odutola / ARTnews / January 2014

Toyin Odutola, New Growth (Maebel), detail, 2013, pen ink and bronze marker on board, 13 x 14 inches.
Appears courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC. 

Ballpoint Is on a Roll

Accessible and affordable, the ballpoint pen has become the medium of choice for artists to make obsessive abstractions, extreme drawings, and playful riffs on venerated ink traditions

Text | Trent Morse

Excerpt:

Last August, Toyin Odutola brought a stack of ballpoint pens and markers into the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, sat down, and drew a picture. A large screen projected her progress as she filled the paper with thousands of marks. Museumgoers circled around her and asked her questions. “One lady was like, ‘Is that pen? I don’t believe it!’” Odutola recalls. “I was drawing, and she took the pen out of my hand and looked at it.”

To shut out these kinds of distractions and focus on the task at hand, Odutola put on headphones and listened to dance music. Four hours after she started drawing, she was done, having produced a densely limned portrait of an Asian woman with golden hair and eyebrows, her skin composed of Odutola’s signature sinewy ballpoint lines, with blue, green, and flesh tones rising from underneath. “It was shocking that I finished, because I’d never really performed drawing,” says Odutola, who was born in Nigeria and grew up in the Bay Area and Alabama. “It’s normally a very solitary act within my studio.”

To read complete story and view art created with ballpoint pen, pick up a copy of the January 2014 issue of ARTnews on newsstands now or read online here.

INDIANAPOLIS: Toyin Odutola

December 6, 2013 – January 25, 2014

Opening reception: Friday, December 6, 6-11 PM

Artist talk facilitated by Malina Simone Jeffers: Saturday, December 7, 1 PM

INDIANAPOLIS MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

The Murphy Art Center, Fountain Square

1043 Virginia Avenue, Suite 5

Indianapolis IN

Artist talk

From indymoca.org:

Toyin Odutola’s pieces evoke a multitude of feelings, like ones you might experience when looking at an actual person.  Although her work mainly features characters rendered in black ink, their appeal is universal.  Odutola’s work addresses issues of identity, and stand as a beacon in the storm of the human experience.

Odutola says of her work, “Where some may see flat, static narratives, I see a spectrum of tonal gradations and realities. What I am creating is literally black portraiture with ballpoint pen ink. I’m looking for that in-between state in an individual where the overarching definition is lost. Skin as geography is the terrain I expand by emphasizing the specificity of blackness, where an individual’s subjectivity, various realities and experiences can be drawn onto the diverse topography of the epidermis. From there, the possibilities of portraying a fully-fledged person are endless.”

People across the nation and in Indianapolis continue to find themselves in challenging conversations about identity.  Regardless of what you may think about these issues, Odutola’s pieces are alive in the way you can interact with them. People are often more open to the conversations contained within art than to each other. And that is how Odutola is helping change the art world and anyone who experiences her work. It’s not art for a particular group of people. It’s art for anyone who appreciates truth and beauty.

Toyin Odutola was born in Ife Nigeria in 1985. She grew up in Alabama, received a B.A. from the University of Huntsville in 2008, then an MFA from the California College of the Arts. Her work has shown in museums and galleries all across the United States. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery and currently lives in New York City.

Exhibit Link

Toyin Odutola and the Public Struggle 

On Collaboration: Solange Knowles x Toyin Odutola

NEW YORK: Toyin Odutola

My Country Has No Name

May 16 – June 29, 2013

Opening reception:  Thursday, May 16^th, from 6 – 8 PM

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 West 20^th Street

New York, NY

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce My Country Has No Name, an exhibition of pen ink drawings on paper, metallic marker drawings, ink on black board and new lithographs by Toyin Odutola. Together, the range of works represent Odutola’s practice which is grounded in an obsessively fine and meticulous application of line that has become the specified visual language through which she explores the human form as a landscape. My Country Has No Name is an exploration of identity rooted in the friction created by hyphenated nationalities and a study into what comes from a reconciliation of seemingly distant and divergent cultural homes to form a new multilayered reality.

Her pen markings, dense and engraved, either stand alone or cover kaleidoscopic color fields that emanate from within. The acute depictions of skin and hair both portray the figure, often Odutola, as well as reference scientific renderings of subdermal muscular structures. While concerned with the historical representation of the black subject in modern and contemporary portraiture, Odutola’s focus shifts to the transcendence of skin (color) and placement (origin), opening a field for the viewer to place themselves in the work; finding spaces to belong or to reject, to possess, to implant one’s self or to find freedom from the rejection of that space.

All These Garlands Prove Nothing is a series of self-portraits recording the range of hairstyles donned by the artist. By isolating the figure against the blank white background and repeating the subject, Odutola is confining the differences mainly to the hair and position of the body. The interest is less in style and more in the undertones and associations this specific physical embellishment provides when thinking about the pliability of identity. These works dance between the understandings of one’s own identity and the understanding of one’s identity as it relates what is being reflected back from another’s gaze.

In Come Closer: Black Surfaces. Black Grounds, Odutola uses black ink on black board to question the validity, the aesthetic and the meaning of the material aspect of blackness and how those connotations feed into social identities and as she describes, “a personal rejection of all the ideas I associated with blackness in myself”. The series Gauging Tone employs the same black board, but instead of black ink, Odutola uses a metallic Sharpie to cast lines and fill the negative space. Odutola questions the inversion of her own aesthetic and in doing so looks upon the equally problematic proposition of how black people see one another.

Toyin Odutola, born in Nigeria, currently lives and works in Alabama. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States. Selected group exhibitions include Ballpoint Pen Drawing Since 1950, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, 2013; The Progress of Love, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, 2012-2013; and Fore and Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2012-2013. She is a recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship Award; Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship Grant, Yale/Norfolk; and the Erzulie Veasey Johnson Painting & Drawing Award. She is included in the public collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii and The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Image via jackshainman.com.

Exhibit Link

HOUSTON: The Progress of Love

Zina Saro-Wiwa, Eaten By The Heart (Video Still), 2012.

December 2, 2012 – March 17, 2013

THE MENIL COLLECTION

1533 Sul Ross 

Houston, TX

Numerous scholars have addressed the ways media, technology, and capitalism have affected Western notions of love over the last few centuries. Little attention, however, has been paid to the impact of these forces on the conception of love in Africa, or even to the subject itself. The Progress of Love explores romantic love, self-love, friendship, familial affect, love of one’s country, and other bonds in and around the continent. Though the exhibition is weighted towards art produced specifically about love in Africa, works that might otherwise be considered more “Western” in orientation are included as well, calling attention to the global exchange through which such concepts develop, and to both the shared and distinct aspects of the experience of love.

Bringing together the work of over twenty artists, and ranging in media from painting and photography to installation, video, and performance, The Progress of Love considers how technology, economic systems, and other forces have shaped–and continue to shape–ideas about love and their expression. In doing so, the exhibition seeks to ask what part of love is universal? What part is timeless and what is a cultural construct?

Yinka Shonibare’s The Swing, 2001, calls attention to the way Western notions of romantic heterosexual, monogamous love were brought into being through an increasingly globalized economy and reproductive technologies such as the printing press. Mounir Fatmi’s Connections (Conspiracy), 2008, an installation of seminal Western and Arabic books wired together, speaks to the international circuits through which love travels, and of the transformative, sometimes even explosive, effects of the dissemination of religious and philosophical texts on ideas of the self and other. Artists such as Zoulikha Bouabdellah and Kendell Geers consider the effects of language, how one’s primary or secondary tongue affects the way one conceives of this dyad, and raise questions about the ability to be understood across a linguistic or cultural gap.

While many works in the show explicitly address the subject of love, others can be understood more indirectly as acts of love in their creation or in the experience they provide. Created specifically for this exhibition, in Romuald Hazoumé’s new project the artist has founded a nongovernmental organization based in Cotonou, Benin, and is inviting his fellow Beninois to express love for self and others by making contributions to Westerners in hopes of helping them live better lives. In so doing, he offers a critical reevaluation of charity and the intersections between love and money.

Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and a rich program of related events, The Progress of Love examines the varied and ever-changing conceptions of love, pointing to the intercultural currents that inform them and in which they, in turn, inform. The project is co-organized by Kristina Van Dyke, former curator for collections and research at the Menil Collection, and Bisi Silva, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos. The Progress of Love exhibition will be mounted simultaneously at both venues and also at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. A series of web-format exchanges further links the two incarnations. 

The Progress of Love is a collaborative project between The Menil Collection, Houston, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA, Lagos), and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis.

This exhibition is generously supported by The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis; Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Bill and Sara Morgan; David and Anne Kirkland; Mark Wawro and Melanie Gray; Michael Zilkha; Clare Casademont and Michael Metz; Haynes Whaley Associates, Inc.; Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P.; Gensler; proceeds from Men of Menil; and the City of Houston.

The Progress of Love 

(Web site)

The Progress of Love 

(Full Press Release)

Exhibit Link

(The Menil Collection)

CLIP ART: Toyin Odutola / ARISE magazine / Issue 13

ARTICLE BY LARRY OSSEI-MENSAH

Article clipped from Issue 13 of ARISE Magazine. Launched in October 2008, ARISE is a style and culture magazine that celebrates African and African American achievements in the realms of fashion, music, business, politics and art. Full text to this article can be read online by clicking "Text/Press/News" link at ToyinOdutola.com. 

ARISE magazine Issue 13 available on newsstands now!

ARISE mission statement:

ARISE magazine is the herald of modern Africa and its global cultural echo. It aims to redress the imbalance in the portrayal of Africa, by much of the international media, by communicating the landmark successes that Africans, and people of African descent, have achieved in fields as varied as fashion, business and politics.

ARISE Online

Toyin Odutola

Toyin Odutola Blog

MORE Toyin Odutola on BlackArtistNews

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NEW YORK: Toyin Odutola / (MAPS) / Jack Shainman Gallery / May 26 - June 25, 2011

Toyin Odutola / (MAPS) / May 26 - June 25, 2011

 Opening reception for the artist: Thursday, May 26, from 6 – 8 PM

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce (MAPS), an exhibition of new works by Toyin Odutola. This will be her first solo show in New York.

Through an extraordinarily detailed, almost obsessive approach, Odutola explores various interpretations of blackness in image-making using ball point pens, ink and paper. Through monochromatic, tonal density she explores and expands upon these histories and representations. A relentless layering, mapping and cropping of each portrait allows for a tension to reveal itself, where the contradictions become almost too heavy and burdensome for the fragile paper to bear. The figurative subjects are impenetrable, solid, and embossed into the picture plane. Odutola often melds snapshots of friends and models with her own likeness. In so doing, she investigates whether the place which one inhabits (a skin, a locale, a presence) can simultaneously exist within and outside of a definition. The portrayal of the subject does not specifically belong to any locus, yet is inherently connected to the human dermal landscape.

The sense of place and presence are important conceptual themes throughout Odutolas work. Growing up as a child in a perpetually transient mode, she describes the allowance of context, to become permeable, flexible and impermanent, somewhat precarious and at times unimportant. Through a frequent search for security in decontexualized surroundings, Odutola employs emptied blank spaces that render her subjects neither within nor without. She creates a lexicon from the laborious, time-consuming process of meticulous mark-making, prying at the idea of what her skin means to her and claiming her own space. Odutola roams within this open expanse, a part of it, regardless of the changes which may befall everything around us and the histories and representations navigated by us all.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm. For additional information and photographic material please contact the gallery at info@jackshainman.com.

The following was posted by Toyin Odutola on her blog http://tobia.tumblr.com/:

26th May 2011

"Today: Just a few hours ago, I shook Julie Mehretu’s hand as she viewed my show at JSG. I almost died."

Toyin Odutola, born in Nigeria, currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA. She is a first year MFA at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions including The Black Portrait, Rush Gallery, New York, curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Natasha L. Logan, Common Ground, ARTLAB33 / Art Space, Miami, curated by Onajide Shabaka and Selections on View in the Contemporary Galleries of the Birmingham Museum. She is a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship Grant, Yale/Norfolk and the Erzulie Veasey Johnson Painting & Drawing Award.

Gallery site

Artist site