Ojo Agi

 ARTIST STATEMENT

My art praxis is dedicated to storytelling via figurative drawing. In 2012, I began drawing on brown paper, through which I invite viewers to question the process of racialization. The use of brown paper subverts the dominant art tradition of drawing or painting on a white background. In doing so, my drawings prompt viewers to consider an environment (both on and off the page) in which Blackness is normalized and Black subjects unconditionally belong. Through emotive characters, viewers empathize with the experiences of migration, displacement, cultural hybridity, and transnational kinship. Informed by my research in health sciences, women and gender studies, and art history, my drawings are also part of my decolonial pedagogy–making the political personal and the abstract practical. I recognize my art as a form of research dissemination, through which I probe the lasting impacts of European colonialism on African and Afro-diasporic peoples, and discover ways to reclaim, recover, and restore our agency, traditions, and humanity.

For more information, read “Refusing the Gaze” published with Herizons Magazine in Fall 2023.