Episode 58: Odili Donald Odita’s “Cut” (2016)
VOICE 1: Should I describe, like, the colors? Okay. They are a mixture of bright and more muted colors.
VOICE 2: They're sort of a crazy arrangement of colors with this magenta and a teal and various colors of mustard and orange. But they work so beautifully together.
VOICE 3: And the first thing that stands out is very dramatic movement of various colors. Like, um, it's like a kind of a cross between an arm wrestle and a ballet. It's a unified kind of arm wrestle.
VOICE 2: There's a vibrancy there to that choice of colors. There's warmth.
VOICE 1: Turquoise and the teal. It's like a sky blue?
VOICE 4: Mint. I don't know if it's mint green and sort of a slate blue.
VOICE 1: I don't know if that's my eyes just being liars.
VOICE 4: A blue that I can see... my kitchen is painted that color.
VOICE 1: It kind of reminds me of the sixties, I think just because the color palette has that, like, more retro feel. I don't know when I see, like, that color teal, I just think of like a kitchen from, like, the sixties and seventies, and then mixed with, like, a magenta and then the mustard color. I think we can kind of like think of like furniture and like appliances that were mustard colors. It's more of like the contemporary take on what that era was.
VOICE 1: The colors are in these, like, geometric pieces, and they look a lot like like stained glass.
VOICE 5: It reminds me a lot of flames, like flames emanating from a log in a fireplace or something like that.
VOICE 3: It could be a waterfall of colors. It could be the sunlight shining through different color gels.
VOICE 2: I see fragments, but they're all connected by a diagonal line that runs from sort of the top right of the print to the bottom left. And so all these fragments are sort of joined together by that axis.
VOICE 3: There's a dramatic, disruptive, uh, line that goes through, uh, the work, but, um, the color is overcoming that. If anything, the color comes closer to you because of that.
VOICE 1: It's almost mirrored like one side is kind of echoing the other, but it's kind of a little off. Like it has that, like, almost symmetry.
VOICE 5: It feels to me like color that's overtaking each other. That's that's having a relationship or a conversation with each other in different directions.
VOICE 2: Even though you could say that it's sort of cutting all of these fragments down this horizontal line, I see it more like uniting them.
VOICE 5: The diagonal line cutting through made me think of each half as a hand, and the hands are applauding when they come together along that line, something like that. It feels celebratory to me.
VOICE 3: The colors are coming together like it's the factory floor of color. The colors are coming together, trying to form something. They're looking for a shape.
VOICE 1: Yeah. It's harder to talk about when it's abstract, but this actually is recognizable because it shapes. We all know what shapes are. Triangles and trapezoids and no circles. Anything with an edge.
VOICE 3: There's something natural about, and organic, that's very kind of, you know, soothing and, but, yet inspiring.
I was told a lot of things would change when I had kids. People really don’t hold back when it comes to that kind of unsolicited new parent advice, but one common refrain is how differently I was going to start seeing the world. Which is of course true; I mean, the world is now a place where my heart exists outside my body. I can’t watch movies where a child is sad, or happy, or away from his family, or pleasantly with his family. I am kinder to parents of crying babies on planes. I am crueler to twentysomethings. So yes, I see the world differently, just like they said I would. But no one told me anything, specifically, about the colors.
You don’t really realize it when it’s happening, but growing up is like one long slider turning down color dial. The sophisticated adult world has books without pictures, black leggings and beige Ann Taylor blazers and muted, sensible wall paint with mature names like sage and linen and ash. And you get so ensconced in this world that you consider yourself enough of an adult to have a baby, who inevitably becomes a toddler, and bam, now your life, like mine, is an explosion of color. We live inside a prism that reflects sunlight 24/7. Muppets, Legos, his spoon, his rainbow puffer jacket, his stacking rings, the hand-me-down Fisher Price train that sometimes goes off randomly in the dark and baths the wall in flashing lights, like a passing cop car had been commandeered by circus clowns. And it’s not just seeing color, it’s talking about it incessantly, recognizing it everywhere. Every day on his way to preschool, we point out the yellow bus, the green grass, the red light, like their color is at least as important as their function, like color is part of the fundamental substance of a thing. And the truth is, when you’re not popping Excedrin, you really do appreciate how bright and vibrant the world is, how deeply color colors our experience of it, and how exciting it must be for my son to just open his eyes in the morning.
I mean, think about what color really is, how widely it casts its net in our lives. Color affects us from the inside out, as exhilarating and emotional as music, as ordinary as a plastic toothbrush handle. Color explains us: our cultures, rituals, patterns, pigments, skin tones. And when put in those terms, color is both exotic and exoticized, spiritual and stereotyped. And whether or not you experience color’s full spectrum of light, music, movement, culture, history, and feeling when you stand in front of this showstopping print by Nigerian-American artist Odili Donald Odita – its abstract, unpredictable, rhythmic color shards dancing you across the canvas – you certainly feel enough of a jolt to blow your aperture wide open. To prime yourself for that experience.
Of course, we’ve looked at color many times before, through artists who have attempted to articulate or manipulate these characteristics: the spiritual transcendence of a Mondrian, the clean visual articulation of a Herrera, the emotional expressiveness of a Van Gogh, the hazy meditativeness of a Rothko, the historical grounding of a Kandinsky. But we’ve never seen them all at once, not like this. We’ve never had an artist so deeply mine art historical precedent to arrive at something so new, so conceptually rich, and at the same time so straightforward, so deeply rooted in culture and context. Odita is an abstract artist, but he’s adamant that his work isn’t abstract the way that Mondrian’s is; he’s not using color to achieve some sort of utopia that lifts us out of the world’s inherent mess. Instead, it’s like he’s pulled colors from the mess, from every source in the world, every stacking ring and puffer jacket and stop sign and textile and bit of wallpaper from a childhood split between Nigeria and Ohio. Colors, to Odita, are boots on the ground, potent signifiers, the substance of a life lived, and being lived.
Obviously this is a lot, this attempt to contain the whole chromatic world in a canvas, all its emotions and experiences and associations, like when Milo accidentally loses control of the color orchestra in The Phantom Tollbooth. It would be too much to bear without the structure of an artistic movement, and yet is far too sprawling to be contained by one. But this is what makes Odita so unique. Because he categorically resists movements. And this was a conscious choice: having closely studied the work of Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland when he was in art school, he knew abstraction was his voice. But as a black artist, a historically underrepresented voice in the canon, didn’t want to be swallowed by their movements, by their narratives, the way that even at our most charitable, we only understand an artist like Carmen Herrera by way of Ellsworth Kelly – we slot her in; you know, her work is like his. Such is the story when it comes to minority voices, or at least a minority in the art world, like women and people of color – we put them in contexts that we can understand. And, hey, I’ve argued for this myself in the past. That’s why I say it’s us being charitable: I mean, better that we understand Herrera alongside the artists she most closely aligned with, to return her to where she belonged and recognize that she was there all along, then to do what art historians of past generations have always done, that is, compare her to all other women artists, like they occupy a separate space from the rest of the artmaking world. But the thing is, in some ways, they do. Being overlooked or pushed out of a predominant narrative in real time affects you, and it affects your art. And Odita was particularly interested in black artists who experienced this the most, artists from a previous generation. And he made a project of interviewing several of them, hearing, in their own words, how ignored they were, how they were always seen to have come to movements late when they might have even been ahead of the curve, but had just gone unnoticed. For example, black abstract artists like Ed Clark and Frank Bowling were producing shaped, colorful abstracts before Frank Stella, but because Stella was the one who made it onto the star-making critic Clement Greenberg’s dance card in real time, he’s the artist most closely associated with the movement and the style. Meanwhile Clark and Bowling are only getting their due, like Carmen Herrera, today, as though decades late to a party they literally co-hosted.
And how does this exclusion affect the art? Often, by forcing it into stereotypes. In his interviews, Odita also found that culture rewarded minority artists entering the fray as minority artists, in other words, leaning into what is “expected” of your work: as a child-bearing woman, as an exotic person of color. Black artists from the 1960s, particularly African artists, had to contend with the Africa that white westerners assumed they knew; we discussed this with El Anatsui in episode 15, and Carrie Mae Weems in episode 50. But with all due respect, none put it better than America’s Next Top Model Cycle 3’s Yaya when she dismissed the cheap Kente cloth hat she was nudged towards: African art tends to be reduced to stereotypes in the extreme, cultures flattened and mashed together under the disingenuous guise of exoticism. So you can understand why artists both played with and traded on these expectations, why Frank Bowling used his African blackness as both an authentic identity and an identitarian starting point when he incorporated the colors of a Guyanese flag into his painting “Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman” from 1968. It was an artwork that intended, more than anything, to engage the famous abstract painter Barnett Newman in a discourse on abstraction itself, but, intentionally, and maybe preemptively, found itself inextricable from the identities of the artists.
And so you can understand why Odita, a generation later, found all of this incredibly discouraging, and wanted to be free of it. Broadly, of course, if you were never part of a movement, you could never be excluded from it. And in particular, if you present Africa – and specifically his home country of Nigeria – in all its shades and nuances, the textiles, the wallpaper of his home, the landscape, the TV test patterns – truly, all its colors – then you can evade stereotypes. And so he, as an artist, set out to create a path as unique as his own story: he was born in 1966, his family fled the Nigerian civil war and settled in Ohio, bifurcating his childhood between African traditions and American pop culture, a zigzag of experiences and associations he reflects as shards of color in his own work. He writes, “I wanted people to identify the trope of Africa with this structure and color and see the patterns of one world and another world pushing into the space of the painting. People start engaging with other things that are occurring – texture, color, the dynamic the composition, light, what the space creates, how it relates to your body and mind. If it’s successful,” he concludes, “it doesn’t end in a trope.”
So then let’s try this ourselves, let’s engage with the work, with everything that’s occurring. I found that for myself, you think you’re just going to enjoy an abstract vibrant canvas of colors until it turns into a turbine that sucks in your eye. The painting never stops moving, and your focus never sits still, as the colors flash like rotating disco lights, and the diagonal slash pulls you inward, like you’re about to go over the precipice of a waterfall. This cut, in Odita’s words, allow the colors to “come together and come apart,” connecting yet never quite becoming one another; instead they transition as smoothly and completely as a DJ lining up beats, never letting the rhythm stop. This canvas is lean, pure, explosive, and resonant. Odita has taken flatness and made it dance.
And all of this dynamism is entirely a product of how he chooses and aligns these colors. They’re not obviously pretty together; If you described them, especially side-by-side – turquoise next to hot pink next to yellow next to coral with the odd gash of royal blue – they would sound gaudy and discordant, a 50s Formica hellscape. But these colors don’t clash. Or maybe they do, but masterfully; they’re buoyant and joyful and surprisingly gentle on the eye. They’re cleanly confined inside their own lines without feeling severe. Odita’s use of color, and color-mixing, is similarly a product of his philosophy, a straightforward response to a larger conceptual idea of culture and place. He describes his colors as personal, both as a visual imprint of his travels and experiences, and the fact that he mixes them all by his own hand, coordinating them alongside one another and making decisions as he goes. Consequently, he can’t ever make any color twice – like human beings, no two shades are ever repeated. And in this print, in this staggering array of hues, so extraordinary side-by-side, he says, “I am commenting on how differences can be coexistent.”
And a canvas like this, unifying co-existing differences, is an appropriately poetic product of the Brandywine Workshop, the nonprofit cultural institution based in West Philadelphia. Brandywine’s mission is to be a world-class printmaking facility for practicing artists – some famous, some unknown, some international, many local – and to donate much of this astonishing body of work to major institutions who might not necessarily acquire them otherwise, like they have here to the Harvard Art Museum. The Workshop has made similar donations to 13 other major institutions across the country, institutions, and audiences, who now know the names of some extraordinary up-and-coming artists – artists who, like Odita, have carved their own way forward, who have refused to compromise any sense of their own nuanced identity to fit into a movement or a stereotype. It’s this diversity, says Brandywine founder Allan Edmunds, that results in real artistic quality. And so it’s not surprising that Brandywine, and its entire existential philosophy, is a really meaningful place to Odita. “Cut” actually references a large mural he painted on the façade of the Brandywine Workshop building in 2015, called, appropriately, “Our House.” This is an institution that values art as a means of tapping into one’s community, boasting a mission that both prioritizes high-quality artmaking and connections between diverse backgrounds through an exceptionally diverse medium.
And it’s true, diversity is the name of the game when it comes to printmaking. There are few visual genres that invite such a multiplicity of styles and visual characteristics, not just from artist to artist, but from one batch of printing to the next. And you see this incredible variety, this throng of artistic ideas, walking through this exhibition of Brandywine prints at Harvard. I mean, these artworks, a collection of screen prints and offset lithographs, look nothing like one another. There are large, colorful sketch-like illustrations and sensitively-rendered portraits and abstract spatter and collages that look like they’re tattooed into the paper. There are images that look prototypically print-like, intentionally naïve and crude, like the image was carved from the plate with a spoon; and then there’s, of course, “Cut,” whose clean lines and saturated color speak to where the medium can go with a painter’s virtuosity. But what these images share, and what Allan Edmunds had hoped to create, is an elevation of and a dexterity with printmaking, a uniquely democratic and technically tricky medium. As we’ve discussed before, from ukiyo-e prints in episode 42 all the way back to John Heartfield in episode 3, printmaking is a medium that, in its very foundation, is meant to reach and unify people, as many people as possible. Because prints have the ability to be multiples. There’s only one Mona Lisa, or at least only one at a time, depending on how decent you are at forgery. But there are potentially an infinite number of prints. They’re the product of technology, of machinery, taking an artistic moment and multiplying it and disseminating it. And this technology, also, changes the work itself. It becomes art meant for reproduction, to quote the political philosopher Walter Benjamin. And as we discussed extensively in episode 3, art meant for reproduction becomes the perfect medium for political messages, for propaganda, for the streets. And we also see how art meant for reproduction affects the physical work: it becomes cheap, easily created and easily disposed of – don’t forget, you once could have gotten a copy of The Great Wave for the same price as a double helping of noodles. Prints were historically fragile, not because they’re so valuable but because they’re valueless, created to be consumed and discarded, to make room for the next one. And, of course, we see this in the subject matter is meant for reproduction: because they are meant to be turned around so quickly and reach so widely, they tend to focus on life as it is being lived. We see this in the subjects tackled by the Brandywine exhibition at Harvard: politics and identity, social justice and community, journaling life experience as a means of capturing the whole world at once, in the same glorious messiness from which Odita, the consummate printmaker, extracts his colors.
And this is what we are meant to see in them, all flashing and clashing and soulful and bright. We are meant to see the world, and every shape and shard and hue of all the people within it. These are people who have now been invited to participate, to bust out of movements, and to join the party in real time. Because thanks to places like the Brandywine Workshop, and to sensitive trailblazers like Odita, more artists are created every day; more work is exposed to the public, and a greater spectrum of diverse, nuanced stories are told, every day, their colors never repeating, but increasing in vibrancy when they coexist, side-by-side, choosing to come together, rather than apart. No wonder it’s so exciting to open our eyes in the morning.