Toyin Ojih Odutold: “Testing the Name”
The work is more than skin deep. Yet the epidermis is important. In 2018, SCAD Museum of Art presented “Testing the Name,” an exhibition of new drawings by Toyin Ojih Odutola. The exhibition continued her exploration of the merger of two fictional aristocratic Nigerian families through the marriage of two men. Working primarily in pastel on paper, Ojih Odutola constructed an episodic, virtuosic body of work. The following remarks are edited for concision from Ojih Odutola’s conversation with SCAD MOA curatorial staff.
Toyin Ojih Odutola:
“Testing the Name” is part of a larger project that I’ve been working on since 2016. It was predicated by the idea of analyzing and dissecting wealth through historically oppressed bodies, and having the spaces they occupy not be a factor in what they consider themselves to be. The whole experiment was to depict one family who weren’t smiling for you, who didn’t care about your comfort as a viewer, it was about what they chose to do.
From that, I started to hone in on the marriage of two Nigerian men, one Igbo, one Yoruba. It is illegal to be gay in Nigeria. People say, “Why would you tell this story? It’s fictive!” But it could be true. It’s about testing the honor of the family name. And the father is saying “The family name is not affected by this.” So, you’re coming into a space of acceptance, and being human, and the son’s narrative is just as important as anyone else in the family. That’s the core.
When I first started my career, I was working in ballpoint pen. I was engaging with not only blackness as a material, but also skin. I wanted to show an activated surface, a surface that didn’t feel flattened and monolithic. Every material choice I’ve made since then has explored that or expanded that.
Skin is a dynamic entity. The stare that the subject gives is very direct, but the skin is unsettled and dynamic. It feels like they’re breathing, that they could come to life at any moment. But their gaze is very direct, whether that’s at you or somewhere else in the picture plane.
When I first came to this country, I was immediately aware of how this covering, my epidermis, read before I entered a room. It was somehow a cloud or a front that people would engage with before even speaking to me, before they got to know me. And that fascinated me as a kid, because I am a person. There are contradictions about me, there are a lot of things that come together to make me, and it can’t just be one thing. I can’t be one person based on an epidermis. So, I play on skin as one way to push against that idea of what we presume to be a person.
My advice for students is stay hungry. The thing that always drove me is that I was hungry, not just for respect and recognition, but to draw. There’s a certain compulsion you have to have. There were times when I was in my apartment in Alabama, and I didn’t know what my drawings were, but I loved them so much, because I thought: I just want to see this for me. That can be so powerful. And if you hold on to that, whatever comes will come. You have to be satisfied with your mark.
