Odili Donald Odita is a Nigerian American abstract painter. His colorful, geometric pieces reside in museums across the country and have been exhibited at the world famous Venice Biennale. His painting “Rise” hangs in the Ezra Stiles College common room at Yale, and his latest exhibition “Burning Cross” is currently showing at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City. The show deals with themes of threats to democracy, marginality, and transformation. Odita’s work interrogates America’s current political chaos with the instruments of color and shape.
When did you begin conceiving the show, and was there a specific impetus for its inception?
Whenever I have a show, I always think about where my mind is at or where I’m at in the world. In this particular show, I look at now. It’s the aftermath of Trump, and I look at democracy in this light. It’s not that I’m focusing specifically on democracy as an academic term, but in general the struggle and the mistreatment everywhere. It all came down to this idea of fighting for one’s individual freedom within an idea of a state, or within an idea of the world.
You’ve spoken about how abstraction, to you, is the most efficacious way of expressing political sentiments and protests. Could you elaborate on that, especially because you were educated during a time when figuration was really the only accepted way to express political ideas?
When I look at abstractions, it allows me the opportunity to escape language to a certain extent. On one level, it allows me to be able to take some significant form or color and give it meaning in one context and give it another meeting in another context. And that freedom is really purposeful because that I can become more of an agent. I have more agency in the process of making the work. I’m not denying figuration, because I love figuration. But sometimes we get caught up in the historic meaning of things as much as the meaning of the thing that we see before us. And that becomes super problematic because you speak from the trap, versus being able to speak outside of the trap. Artists have to always find their way outside of that box so they can step in and make the changes that they need to make. Abstraction allows me more latitude with the idea of trying to step away from language and the trap.
You’ve noted before that abstraction has utopian roots. How did that inform your creation of this show?
That’s a big question. For me, I’m trying to bring in my African roots. It’s my sense of otherness coming from a Nigerian space. There’s a certain kind of classicism called traditionalism, a concept of how one engages the world. I think about things my father told me that he did as a kid, traditional things like energizing the space and how to clean it. I’m reflecting on that sense of entering a day. Art making for me, is the idea of having a sense of hope in the things that you do. I’m trying to put all those different things that I experienced in my life into the show, plus the energy of my African history, my African heritage, and my past. With this, it could possibly bring something new to the game.
Does this collection feel very hopeful to you?
It’s hopeful and traditional in the sense that I hope to continue to think through the ideas brought here. I want to continue to think through the problems that are occurring in my paintings, because these paintings are not like, “I want to recreate an idea from my mind.” I’m asking questions that I want to pursue in the paintings. I’m asking questions about what I’m doing with the color, what I’m doing with the shape, and how they balance things like the pattern of wood panels. A lot of my work is about the internal logic of color and how I’m playing with the color to try to create certain kinds of space. These are very determined spaces. They’re not just colors thrown in there. I’m trying to deal with a certain segment of objectiveness and a certain figment of light in a real space. I’m trying to have color codes that are non-associative, not necessarily specific to nature, that work in a way that is of the nature of the space. I’m interested in both Renaissance painting and, say, Minecraft. I’m interested in the way in which computers make space. What is the logic of one point perspective? That’s super interesting to me. In our world, the sun dictates our light. But that doesn’t mean that’s the ultimate, because if we lived on another planet, or another part of the universe, that could be another dictator of how light is projected, or what light could be, or what colors exist. This might be somewhat of an offshoot, but the digital realm is hopeful in its constructed infinity, expansiveness.
Do you have strong opinions on AI generated art?
My daughter loves AI art and new media. I was walking around looking at it the other day, just in the streets walking at night, looking in some of the windows that project this art. Some of the worst of it is just a mimic of what we already know. But it’s like they’ve taken the rules and reformed them. What’s super interesting is when you can understand what the rules are, and turn them upside down and make something new. AI art is another space of creativity. And I think that people could possibly do super interesting things, understanding the parameters of space and then how to go beyond that. On the topic of the internet, in my day, the motto was ‘information is free,’ and in the interaction with information we can free ourselves. We don’t have to be bodies that are signified by gender, or age, or race, or anything. We become information and are free. But over the decades have seen that it’s been super commercialized. And now the internet has been used for revolution and revolutionary change. But it’s also used to quash revolution. And it’s used for propaganda, for confusion, for bullying, and so forth. It is still the most viable space for certain types of freedom. And at the same time, it’s so savage.
Could you explain the piece Game Change?
There’s only 20 colors in this painting. It’s the same 20 colors on top as the bottom. I made it look like a box on top, and it becomes a jagged pile or a column on the bottom. I look at this painting, and I think, this is like a numbers game in a sense. I have codes, colors have the codes, and I put the codes here a certain way. And there’s a certain verticality that maintains itself throughout, but it becomes a yin yang. The bottom half is a pile of disorder. So then the question becomes, is this a box of the world resting on a pile of history? Is this the combination? Is this order? Is combination order, and is order sitting on a pile of heads, is the cost of order the pile of heads? This kind of game can go on and on and on, by playing with the idea of what’s happening with the space and what’s happening with the color. I’m using all of this formalism to be able to construct these different singular elements into this big crescendo, called the psychology of the painting, however you might understand it.
How about Body and Space?
I selected the colors and the way in which they come together at random, from church windows and such. When I think about my history and the history of things I’ve learned in life like songs, music, reading, TV, conversations — they all come together in this big soup of recipes, and you can bring everything to the world by distilling and sifting through all this pile of information. This is why painting and art are so hard, because you’ve got everything in front of you but you’ve got to start choosing things. So if we step back we can see that there’s the look of figures in this painting. A head and shoulder shape is happening on a body. It looks something like this person entering outer space. And with Afrofuturist Sun Ra’s notions of space, the idea was that we have to leave Planet Earth because there’s no space for Black people on this planet. We need to leave Earth because we need to find a better place for ourselves to exist as a community, as a society, as a people. So there’s this note of Afrofuturism here. This painting is very much about the body in space in the way in which it’s a DNA helix.
What do you think has been the biggest influence on your career: a force, a person, or a certain understanding you have?
I think there’s so many things, but really just understanding. It’s the way that I can understand the things I’ve seen in my world. I feel lucky that I’ve been around people that have been generous to me, generous with me, and helped me to become more generous in myself in the way that I could understand the world. I see people who are successful, but who are very mean-spirited and are not generous. I don’t want to exist like that. This means not being dictatorial in the way that I understand. It’s not saying “this is right, and everything else is wrong.” But being able to say, “maybe I’m wrong, and let me see how I can understand this other space” and so improve how I understand how it exists in the world.
Cover image: “Burning Cross” exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery on 1/10/23. Photo by Rachel Shin.