It’s alive! It’s alive! Not Dr. Frankenstein’s demon, but another endearing monster born of human intervention in the natural world. This one is an animatronic teddy bear, whose brown fur could use a comb. She wears her white lace panties like a diaper, her head bandaged with an oversized white bow. Tipping the scales at 85 pounds, he would be about three feet tall, if not lying on his side in the undergrowth of a dense, aromatic garden as if in a post-coital swoon , or ravaged by a predator, or simply vanquished by intoxicating scents. Maybe all three.
Named after the haunting main character of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Belovedthe semi-conscious bear is the central sculptural element of the child-eating sun – a living, permacultural environment of Precious Okoyomon as menacing as it is fertile.
These opposing dynamics were part of what made the New York-based Nigerian-American artist’s contribution of a fortress of kudzu and sugar cane, I mean a forest, a central exhibition highlight. by Cecilia Alemani of the Venice Biennale 2022. The installation of Okoyomon was also an act of resistance – against racism, colonialism and any other restrictive power which is its worst enemy as well as ours.
Installation view of Precious Okoyomon: the sun eats its children, Sant’ Andrea de Scaphis, Rome
Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery
Okoyomon’s balance between horrifying and comical, evil and restorative, reaches a climax of mad genius in the gallery of Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, a desecrated ninth-century Roman chapel. Since 2015, when dealer Gavin Brown took over the long-abandoned oratory, it has functioned as an exceptional space for exhibitions by contemporary artists, including Joan Jonas, Arthur Jafa and the late Jannis Kounellis.
Although he is only 29 years old, the singular Okoyomon belongs to their company. “I’ve always played with soil and plants,” Okoyomon told me while setting up their show. There are many of both in the church, now an LED-lit greenhouse with gravel walkways and black butterflies opening sky-blue wings to dance like bells across the 10m-high space, which fills with the celestial symphonic music of Kelsey Lu.
Among other sound effects, the prolonged scream that tears through the air every ten minutes to wake Beloved from his slumber is bloody enough to sit Edvard Munch in his grave. Okoyomon, who often works with collaborators, recorded the scream by blending his own voice with those of choreographer-performer Okwui Okpokwasili and influential black writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman.
A sense of positivity grows with jasmine climbing the seasoned walls of the church, where a fragrant mix of tall lilies, honeysuckle, white dogwood, red roses and other greenery baptizes onlookers with scents that counteract the dark underbelly of the environment.
“I wanted a lot of poisonous plants,” the artist said. They didn’t say that out of spite; the butterflies eat the poison, lay eggs and, when they die, give birth to successive free-flying generations. When the exhibition closes in September, the deliberately uncontrolled growth of all plants will become a jungle of competing wills, each expressing the freedom to be themselves in a different but common way.
Gardens have long provided artists and writers with all sorts of metaphors. Okoyomon uses their plants for effective commentary on black bodies, submission, power, migration, molestation, gambling, decadence, difference, and family relationships that I found both dizzying and unique.
Precious Okoyomon (right) and Kelsey Lu (left) at Sant’ Andrea de Scaphis, Rome
Born in London to Nigerian parents, Okoyomon lived in Lagos until before decamping with their mother to the American Midwest. In Chicago, Okoyomon studied pataphysics and child psychology while cooking at one of the city’s top restaurants. Okoyomon later moved to New York and volunteered for A Community Garden, but from the start identified primarily as a poet.
It was poetry that brought Okoyomon into the art world. It was 2017, when Hans Ulrich Obrist read their first published volume and invited Okoyomon to take part in an evening of readings at the Serpentine Gallery. A year later, Okoyomon returned to perform a new play, an epic poem featuring four baby lambs and four black angels. At Art Basel soon after, Obrist moderated a conversation between Okoyomon and Rirkrit Tiravanija, for whom cooking is a central tenet of his art.
Okoyomon also met Brown, Tiravanija’s dealer. Everything is connected.
Interestingly, the artist was never listed by any gallery – another form of resistance. This has not hindered their cascading institutional solo exhibitions: MMK in Frankfurt (2020), Performance Space New York (2021) and the Aspen Art Museum (2021-22). In 2021, Okoyomon won both the Frieze New York Artist Prize and the Chanel Next Prize. Their current show in Rome is their first in a (nominally) commercial space.
A career as a visual artist was not Okoyomon’s intention when he started out as a writer. “I had no plan,” they said. “But somehow, I always knew my words would guide me.”
• Precious Okoyomon: the sun eats its children, Sant’ Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, until September 16
