Manifesto

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Manifesto, 2017 is a vivid expression in sumptuous tones. A black man gazes sombrely out a window. The entire drawing is composed of radiant intersecting patterns, most apparent in the figure’s shifting skin which varies in tonality and luminescence; the treatment is characteristic for the artist. For Odutola, skin is an inhabitable place that can ‘illustrat[e] the freedom to be in a body and move through space’ (T. Odutola quoted in O. Yerebakan, ‘There is No Story That is Not True: An Interview with Toyin Ojih Odutola’, The Paris Review, 27 September 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/09/27/there-is-no-story-that-is-not-true-an-interview-with-toyin-ojih-odutola/). Each figure she draws originates in a story the artist conceives, and Odutola understands them to exist in specific moments. Yet the artist does not consider herself to be a writer; rather, her stories give shape to the scenes that she eventually transforms into drawings, and she turned to these fictions in order to escape biographical interpretations of her work. Born in Nigeria, Odutola immigrated to the United States at the age of five. As her drawings feature black men and women, they were often interpreted through the lens of her own migratory past. Drawing on this past, Odutola developed portraits of an imaginary Nigerian family for her 2017-2018 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Creating her own narratives has enabled the artist to challenge these readings by expanding ‘not only the definition of blackness, but [also] what blackness can contain, what blackness can reveal, and where it can go’ (T. Odutola quoted in K. Geha, ‘A Starting Point’, The Georgia Review, Summer 2019, n. p.). In these graphic, sensitive, new stories and truths can be gleaned.