Artwork Page for Italo

Details / Information for Italo

Italo

2021

Kambui Olujimi

(American, b. 1976)
Culture
Medium
ink and graphite on paper
Measurements
Unframed: 182.9 x 223.5 cm (72 x 88 in.); Framed: 204.5 x 242.6 cm (80 1/2 x 95 1/2 in.)
Credit Line
Partial Gift of the Contemporary Art Society and Partial Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 2021.147
Copyright
© Kambui Olujimi
This artwork is known to be under copyright.
Location
Not on view
Print
?

Did You Know?

To simulate floating bodies, the artist used video and photographs of people jumping on trampolines as models for this series.

Description

Kambui Olujimi’s North Star series features paintings, drawings, and video of weightless, floating Black bodies “freed from the gravity of oppression,” as the artist puts it. Olujimi pictures a future in which a politics of resistance can result in true bodily freedom. The artist is interested in representing Black joy or Black rhapsody as a counternarrative to the constant circulation of imagery of Black suffering and death. All of the figures in his paintings have variegated skin tones and ambiguous genders, highlighting their occupation of a transitional space and our perception of them as futuristic, otherworldly beings.
A horizontally oriented drawing depicts at least three nude people floating against a black background swirling with fine gray and purple-brown lines. The people, hovering intertwined in the upper left, are colored mostly in blotchy black ink, with gray and light yellow-brown touches. One leans back, angled upside down, smiling. Another's knee presses into the first's back, at a right angle. A third's head floats between the first two, body appearing to dissolve.

Italo

2021

Kambui Olujimi

(American, b. 1976)

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