Nigerian-born artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, who grew up in Alabama in the USA, creates emotive ink and pen drawings that come alive with the reality of living the black experience.
Toyin, who got her MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, captures movement beautifully in her work, with a textured, layered style.
When describing her choice of materials in an interview with the New York Times, she says, “I used pen and ink, in part because I couldn’t afford my art supplies. The pen is a writing tool first. In West Africa, where the narrative tradition is oral, the visual bridges the written and the spoken. Yes, I was drawing. But it was, to me, a form of letter-writing too.”
She sees her art as letters written to people who look like her so that they can see themselves in her image while reflecting on the depths of brown skin. “The epidermis packs so much. Why would you limit it to the flattest blackness possible?”