Odili Donald Odita

Biography

At the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, in Robert Storr’s main exhibition “Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind”, a large installation by Odili Donald Odita, “Give Me Shelter”, was given a prominent place. The same year the Studio Museum in Harlem held his solo show “Equalizer”, and he received a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

He was forty-one. It had all started with copying comics.

Odita was born on 18 February 1966 in Enugu, in eastern Nigeria, and is of Igbo origin. In 1967, at the start of the civil war known as the Biafran War, his family left for the United States, and he grew up in Columbus, Ohio. From the age of five the boy copied superheroes from comic books, then pictures from fashion magazines, drawing day and night until he fell asleep from exhaustion. The decision to become an artist, in his own account, came after a real marathon: he copied, one after another, a whole stack of prints and drawings that his father, an art historian, had collected for his work.

In 1988 he graduated with distinction from Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, receiving the university’s Excellence in the Arts Award, and in 1990 he took his master’s degree at Bennington College in Vermont. In the 1990s Odita wrote as well as painted: he was a critic for Flash Art International and a consulting editor and writer for NKA, the journal of contemporary African art. In 1994 he received a Penny McCall Foundation grant, in 1997 he took part in the second Johannesburg Biennale, and in 1998 he held the international ART/OMI residency. Then came teaching: Florida State University in Tallahassee in 2000–2006, alongside the University of South Florida in Tampa (2002–2003) and a post as visiting critic in painting at the Yale University School of Art (2003–2005). Since 2006 he has taught painting at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University in Philadelphia. In 2001 a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant was added to his earlier awards.

Almost all his works since the 1990s are large paintings on canvas and Plexiglas; he also makes photo-based pieces and installations, and sometimes paints directly onto walls to change the sense of a space. He is recognised by his complex interlocking geometric forms and sharply contrasting colours. He names the source of these bands and wedges himself: the bright textiles of Nigeria mixed with the patterns of Western modernity. Colour concerns him both as part of history and as a social and political sign, and critics see questions about race and society in his abstractions. Any visual material, he holds, is rooted in a particular culture, and it matters to understand where its meaning comes from. Odita is often placed alongside Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland, but he deliberately chooses another lineage, the Black abstract painters of the 1970s and 1980s. He has studied and interviewed many of them: Howardena Pindell, Alvin Loving, Edward Clark, Frank Bowling, Stanley Whitney. It seems to me that these conversations explain his painting as much as the Nigerian textiles do.

His known solo exhibitions include “Equalizer” in Harlem (2007), “Third Space” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2008) and a show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2010). He lives and works in Philadelphia.