Eastern Entrance by Toyin Ojih Odutola invites viewers into a fictional world that interrogates historical depictions of wealth and privilege. The work was exhibited in A Matter of Fact at the Museum of the African Diaspora in 2016, a show which marked important new developments for the artist’s portraiture oeuvre – the first time she turned her focus on the surrounding environs in addition to her subjects, and also the first time she introduced vibrant color into her works. In the thought-provoking body of paintings, Toyin weaves an intricate narrative around the extravagantly opulent, and entirely fictitious, Emeka family of the Nigerian Umutze Amara Clan, in order to probe and question constructs of wealth and race in contemporary society. The resultant eighteen works in A Matter of Fact – simultaneously figments of Ojih Odutola’s imagination, and, in a more nuanced sense, symbols of society at large – flit tantalisingly between fact and fiction, history and myth. They are, as the artist proclaimed, “a band of characters who have always existed and yet never existed” (the artist cited in “A Matter of Fact: Toyin Ojih Odutola”, The Museum of African Diaspora Resource Guide, San Francisco 2016, p. 4). In the series, the backdrops surrounding the characters simultaneously informs each subject and becomes subject of enquiry in itself; in the artist’s words: ““The very nature of wealth, the ecology of the space it creates, is the subject” (Ibid).

Born in 1985 in Nigeria, Ojih Odutola has received outstanding critical acclaim in recent years, having enjoyed her first solo-exhibition in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017. Receiving her MFA in Painting and Drawing in 2012 from the California College of the Arts, she is best known for her multimedia drawings as well as works on paper which explore themes of identity and reinvent the genre and traditions of portraiture and storytelling. Influenced by artists such as David Hockney, Lucien Freud, Paula Rego and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, as well as the great twentieth-century social critic James Baldwin, Ojih Odutola’s signature technique of mark-making involves intricately applied layers of shading and sinuous line, interwoven to form labyrinthine patterns of rich tonal gradation, an effect which evokes the topography of skin. Ojih Odutola’s choice of using a pen or pencil also holds special significance, as her mode of working is akin to fiction; she often spends months crafting elaborate narratives that unfold as a series, much like the chapters of a book. At once political and poetic, her visual language powerfully explores notions of identity and belonging, interrogating themes of socio-economic inequality, colonialism, queer and gender theory, migration, dislocation, and notions of blackness as a visual and social symbol.

In the fabulist and enthralling world of Selective Histories, Ojih Odutola’s artistic aims are powerfully and provocatively achieved, and furthermore represents a new artistic direction. Her previous drawings centred around the monochromatic exploration of blackness – both as colour and concept – as tonal, manifold and diverse. Introducing colour into her paintings, the artist expanded her focus to consider and ultimately challenge preconceived notions of race, affluence and, indeed, history itself. “Like Blackness, wealth defines the spaces of those who inhabit it”, she has remarked, “it limits and/or permits movement and readjusts context. Furthermore, like anything involving race and ethnicity, wealth, upon the striated plane of class, is indicative of a history that is invented and constantly reaffirmed to keep the construct going” (the artist cited in “A Matter of Fact: Toyin Ojih Odutola”, op. cit., p. 4). Reaffirming the fictive nature of her characters and of wealth as her primary subject in the series, the artist said: “This was not about science fiction nor reaffirming the actual history of the Black nouveau riche in America and beyond; this was about picturing what wealth does to the viewer’s read when one sees it displayed so nonchalantly – where the wealth and, by extension, the characters defined by such wealth are not questioned” (Ibid).