Behind Toyin Ojih Odutola’s portrait-like drawings (including this 2017 artwork from New York Art Tours archives) are fictional narratives, hinted at through the images but not detailed in words. Her latest body of work opens on-line this week at Jack Shainman Gallery as protesters around the world demand respect for black lives and justice for George Floyd and others killed by police. Ojih Odutola’s new work continues to picture the complexity of black subjectivity in an uncharacteristic pairing of images and texts in which, as the artist puts it, “exactitude is elusive.” Instead, meaning comes from the gap between pictures and words, a place that prompts viewers to consider how their expectations inform interpretation.
