The Visual Artist: Kambui Olujimi
“Most urgently we need relief for those in need. It is time our tax dollars are invested in robust financial support for the arts.”
5 Questions with Kambui Olujimi
Visual Artist
Brooklyn, New York
Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn and received his MFA from Columbia University in New York City. Olujimi’s work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as "inevitabilities." This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance. His solo exhibitions include; Zulu Time, at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, A Life in Pictures, at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Solastalgia, at Cue Arts Foundation, and Wayward North at Art in General. His works have premiered nationally at The Sundance Film Festival, Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA P.S.1, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Mass MoCA. Internationally his work has been featured at The Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok; Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland and Para Site in Hong Kong among others. Olujimi has been awarded residencies from Black Rock Senegal, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and MacDowell Colony. He has received grants and commissions from numerous institutions including The Jerome Foundation, NFYA/ NYSCA Fellowship and MTA Arts & Design. News media and periodicals such as The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, CNN, PBS, and The New York Times and have featured Olujimi’s artwork. Monographs on his past project include Zulu Time (2017), Walk the Plank (2006), Winter in America (in collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas, 2006), The Lost Rivers Index (2007), and Wayward North (2012). Images of Olujimi’s work follow this interview.
1. Tell me about your practice now.
I am currently finishing a project I have been working on for over five years called Walk With Me, which is a series of more than 100 paintings that engages the processes of remembering, forgetting, and mythologizing. On October 23, 2014, I lost my guardian angel, Catherine Arline. Beyond her impact in my personal development, she was a community leader and pillar of the Bedford Stuyvesant community and the city of New York. Since 2015, I have created paintings from a single photograph of her when she moved to New York in 1956.
These portraits slide in and out of fidelity, alternating between gestural, watery movements and tight, "faithful" renderings. The collection offers no truths. Its origin remains elusive, blurring the latent images we create between each work that leave us to build and rebuild each memory in between each retelling.
2. With galleries and museums closed, institutions are losing revenue, but the community is also unable to gather and see new work. Talk to me about the importance of this experience on your artistic production.
Beyond the postponement of my exhibitions and speaking engagements and the financial uncertainty that brings, the inability to convene has been the hardest for me. I was in the early stages of my North Star project, a trans-disciplinary work that reimagines the black body in literal and metaphoric weightlessness. Everything from material tests to interviews and other types of research has been halted. More fundamentally, I—like some many artists—am inspired by my communities across the city and by the city itself. The work flows from walking and talking through the streets and experiencing a city in perpetual flux.
3. How do you guide students through this moment? Also, there is a lot of talk about how a studio education can be moved online… what are your thoughts?
While I’m not currently teaching, I am in touch with many of my former students. I have discussed this with them on many occasions. I have always believed in a decentralized practice. Students need to engage with the abundant resources and communities outside of academia. This fuller exchange with the site of learning and the recognition of a pluralist knowledge bed is most necessary now and even more so moving forward.
4. This crisis could change the landscape of cultural patronage. In your view, what do we most urgently need?
Most urgently we need relief for those in need. The field will lose many who simply can’t afford to make art. The field has been too dependent on the most wealthy to support the cultural industries in this country. The US subsidizes the oil, military, and agriculture industries in addition to countless corporations. It is time our tax dollars are invested in robust financial support for the arts.
5. How do you think the cultural community could leverage this moment to change society’s view of arts as a whole?
I don’t think that it’s the time for leveraging positions. But I will say that one of the many things artists do is synthesize the collective moment. We help society remember, grieve, laugh, escape, dream, and most of all imagine new possibilities. With more than 73,000 COVID-19 deaths nationally (and climbing), the ripples of these lives will be felt throughout the country for decades to come. Art will be one of the few sites where we can collectively make sense of this unprecedented time.
Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn and received his MFA from Columbia University in New York City. Olujimi’s work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as "inevitabilities." This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance.
His solo exhibitions include; Zulu Time, at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, A Life in Pictures, at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Solastalgia, at Cue Arts Foundation, and Wayward North at Art in General.
His works have premiered nationally at The Sundance Film Festival, Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA P.S.1, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Mass MoCA. Internationally his work has been featured at The Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok; Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland and Para Site in Hong Kong among others. Olujimi has been awarded residencies from Black Rock Senegal, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and MacDowell Colony.
He has received grants and commissions from numerous institutions including The Jerome Foundation, NFYA/ NYSCA Fellowship and MTA Arts & Design.
News media and periodicals such as The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, CNN, PBS, and The New York Times and have featured Olujimi’s artwork. Monographs on his past project include Zulu Time (2017), Walk the Plank (2006), Winter in America (in collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas, 2006), The Lost Rivers Index (2007), and Wayward North (2012).
Untitled from Walk With Me Me, series, 2015 - 2020
Ink and graphite on paper
11x14 inches
Walk With Me is a series of 100 portraits of my Guardian Angel, Catherine Arline, who passed in 2014. The work explored the allusive and ineffable nature of commemoration.
Untitled from Walk With Me Me, series, 2015 - 2020
Ink and graphite on paper
11x14 inches
Walk With Me is a series of 100 portraits of my Guardian Angel, Catherine Arline, who passed in 2014. The work explored the allusive and ineffable nature of commemoration.
High Road, 2020
Ink and graphite on paper
20 x 27 inches
North Star asks: What does the Black body, devoid of the “inescapable” gravity of oppression, look like? What is the Black body in zero gravity? As a trans-media project, North Star will re-contextualize the site of blackness and Black bodies within art history and contemporary art, intersecting with Afro-Futurism, Fluxist, and histories of space exploration in post-colonial Africa. The project will be comprised of a short film, large-scale ink paintings and holographic sculptures.
Twin Fall, 2020
Ink and graphite on paper,
52 x 44 inches