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Kambui Olujimi

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Kambui Olujimi
Born1976
Brooklyn, New York U.S.
NationalityAmerican
OccupationVisual artist
WebsiteKambuiOlujimi.com

Kambui Olujimi (born 1976) is a New York-based visual artist working across disciplines using installation, photography, performance, tapestry, works on paper, video, large sculptures and painting.[1] His artwork reflects on public discourse, mythology, historical narrative, social practices, exchange, mediated cultures, resilience and autonomy.[2][3]

Early life and education

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Olujimi was born and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City.[4]

In 1996, he attended Bard College. In 2002, he received a BFA from Parsons School of Design. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2006. In 2013, Olujimi received an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts.[5]

Career

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Reviews of his work have appeared in publications including Art in America, The New York Times,[6] The New Yorker, Modern Painters, Artforum, Hyperallergic,[7] and The Brooklyn Rail.[8] Throughout his career he has received numerous grants and fellowships including from A Blade of Grass,[9] the Jerome Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.[10] He has also collaborated with artists Hank Willis Thomas,[11] Christopher Myers,[12] and Coco Fusco.[13][14]

Olujimi's visual work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art,[15] the Whitney Museum of American Art,[16] the Speed Art Museum,[17] the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University,[18] and the Cleveland Museum of Art.[19][20]

He has taught in the Visual Art programs at Columbia University and Cooper Union.[21][22]

Olujimi was one of the subjects of the short feature Through a Lens Darkly, concerning the struggle for African American photographers to receive recognition.[23]

Personal life

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Some of Olujimi's work is inspired by Bedford-Stuyvesant community leader and activist Catherine Arline, a woman he considered a surrogate mother and referred to as his guardian angel.[24] Olujimi described his series of portraits of Arline as both a "mourning practice" and an experiment in "memory work."[25]

Olujimi currently lives and works in Queens, New York.[25]

Honors

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Awards

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Artist-in-residency

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  • 2023: Denniston Hill (Glen Wild, NY)[28]
  • 2022: Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY)[29]
  • 2022: Archie Bray Foundation (Helena, MT)[30]
  • 2019: Black Rock Senegal (Dakar, Senegal)[31]
  • 2018: MacDowell (Peterborough, NH)[32]
  • 2017: Robert Rauschenberg Residency (Captiva, FL)
  • 2016: Queenspace Residency (Long Island City, NY)
  • 2015: The Fountainhead Residency (Miami, FL)
  • 2015: The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, NY), Process Space Residency[33]
  • 2015: Meet Factory (Prague, Czech Republic)
  • 2015: Civitella Ranieri (Umbertide, Italy)[34]
  • 2014: Franconia Sculpture Park (Franconia, MN)
  • 2013: Tropical Lab 7 (Singapore)
  • 2011: The Center for Book Arts (New York, NY)
  • 2010: Acadia Summer Arts Program (Mt. Desert, ME)
  • 2009: Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE)
  • 2009: Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM)[10]
  • 2007-2009: Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown (Provincetown, MA), 2nd Year Fellow
  • 2007-2009: Apexart: Outbound Residency to Kellerberin, Australia (Kellerberin, Australia)
  • 2006: Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME)
  • 2005: BCAT / Rotunda Gallery Multimedia Artist Residency (New York, NY)

Exhibitions

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Olujimi's work has been exhibited in a number of institutions nationally, including: the Whitney Museum of American Art,[35] Los Angeles County Museum of Art,[36] The Andy Warhol Museum,[37] Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), CUE Arts Foundation (New York, NY), MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, MA),[38] Apexart (New York, NY), Art in General (Brooklyn, NY), The Sundance Film Festival (Park City, UT), Smithsonian Institution, (Washington D.C.), Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (Madison, WI), Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (Houston, TX), The Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX),[39][40] The Newark Museum (Newark, NJ),[41][42] the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY),[8] and Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ.[25]

Internationally, Olujimi's work has been exhibited in the Sharjah Biennial 15 (Sharjah, UAE),[43] the Dakar Biennale Dak'Art 14 (Dakar, Senegal),[44] Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town, South Africa),[45] Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid, Spain), Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland), Para Site (Hong Kong, China), The Jim Thompson Art Center (Bangkok, Thailand).

He has given artist lectures in many institutions nationally and internationally, including Carleton University, Ottawa,[46] University of Buffalo,[47] the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,[48] Rhode Island School of Design.[49]

Works and publications

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  • Olujimi, Kambui (March 1998). "No Regrets No Redemption". The American Poetry Review. 27 (2): 42–43. ISSN 0360-3709. JSTOR 27782650. OCLC 5542854838.
  • Olujimi, Kambui (2003). Off the Record. Brooklyn, NY: The Skylight Gallery at Restoration Plaza. OCLC 758496035.
  • Olujimi, Kambui (2007). The Lost River's Dreamers Index by Dr. Keller. Hartford, CT: Real Art Ways. OCLC 427270355.
  • Olujimi, Kambui; Hickey, Andria; Myers, Christopher (2010). Wayward North. New York: Art in General. ISBN 978-1-934-89028-8. OCLC 829395760.
  • Olujimi, Kambui. Zulu Time; essays by Sampada Aranke, Gregory Volk, and Leah Kolb. Madison, WI: Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. 2017. Exhibition Catalogue.[50]
  • Olujimi, Kambui. Walk With Me; essays by Jasmine Wahi and Christopher Myers. Newark, NJ: Project for Empty Space. 2020. Exhibition Monograph.[51]

Sources

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  • Harris, Thomas A, and Kambui Olujimi. Through a Lens Darkly: Philosophy of the Artist. , 2014. Internet resource.

References

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  1. ^ Whiting, Sam (7 September 2016). "Dancing around the art at Clark gallery". San Francisco Chronicle.
  2. ^ Davis, Ben (25 May 2010). "Summer Guide: Brian Chippendale Paints Up a New Burst of Color Hysteria". The Village Voice.
  3. ^ "Datebook: Kambui Olujimi's 'What Endures' at Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco". Artinfo. 8 September 2016.
  4. ^ Pantuso, Phillip (7 November 2014). "Crossing Brooklyn: Kambui Olujimi, In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same". Brooklyn Magazine.
  5. ^ "List Projects: Kambui Olujimi". e-flux. 18 January 2014.
  6. ^ Mitter, Siddhartha (2021-01-08). "In 177 Portraits, an Artist's Homage to His Bed-Stuy Muse". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  7. ^ "Water as a Cinematic Metaphor for the Tides of Time". Hyperallergic. 2017-11-17. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  8. ^ a b "Kambui Olujimi". CUE Art Foundation. Retrieved 2017-01-02.
  9. ^ "Artist Files Grantees Announced! - A Blade of Grass". A Blade of Grass. 24 January 2013.
  10. ^ a b "New Commissions: Kambui Olujimi, Wayward North". Art in General. 5 June 2010.
  11. ^ "Hank Willis Thomas, Kambui Olujimi | Winter in America (2006) | Artsy". www.artsy.net. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  12. ^ "BOMB Magazine | Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui Olujimi". BOMB Magazine. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  13. ^ Fusco, Coco; Muñoz, José Esteban (2008). "A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America". TDR. 52 (1): 136–159. doi:10.1162/dram.2008.52.1.136. JSTOR 25145494. S2CID 159057627.
  14. ^ Apel, Dora (2012). "Abu Ghraib, Gender, and the Military". War Culture and the Contest of Images. Rutgers University Press. pp. 79–111. ISBN 9780813553955. JSTOR j.ctt5hhwpv.8.
  15. ^ "Brooklyn Museum". www.brooklynmuseum.org. Retrieved 2017-01-02.
  16. ^ "Kambui Olujimi". whitney.org. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  17. ^ "In Case the Wind Will Not Listen". Speed Art Museum. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  18. ^ "Love & Anarchy". Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  19. ^ "Winter in America". Cleveland Museum of Art. 2016-12-31. Retrieved 2017-01-04.
  20. ^ Anonymous (2022-03-17). "Italo". Cleveland Museum of Art. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  21. ^ "Kambui Olujimi". arts.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-01-05. Retrieved 2017-01-04.
  22. ^ "Kambui Olujimi | The Cooper Union". cooper.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-01-05. Retrieved 2017-01-02.
  23. ^ Harris, Thomas A, and Kambui Olujimi. Through a Lens Darkly: Philosophy of the Artist. 2014. Internet resource.
  24. ^ Bautista, Camille (31 October 2014). "Bed-Stuy Residents Mourn Longtime Community Leader". DNAinfo New York. Archived from the original on 5 January 2017.
  25. ^ a b c Mitter, Siddhartha (2021-01-08). "In 177 Portraits, an Artist's Homage to His Bed-Stuy Muse". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  26. ^ "Joan Mitchell Foundation Announces Inaugural Fellows". www.artforum.com. 13 October 2021. Retrieved 2021-11-19.
  27. ^ aclark (2020-11-04). "2020 Colene Brown Art Prize Recipients". BRIC. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  28. ^ "Residents". Denniston Hill. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  29. ^ "Our Artists – Yaddo". Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  30. ^ "The Bray Incubator". Archie Bray. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  31. ^ "Artists Selected for Kehinde Wiley's Inaugural Residency Program in Senegal". www.artforum.com. 23 July 2019. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  32. ^ "Kambui Olujimi - Artist". Macdowell Colony. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  33. ^ "Kambui Olujimi - Lower Manhattan Cultural Council". Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Retrieved 2017-01-02.
  34. ^ "Kambui Olujimi - Fellows - Civitella Ranieri". exhibit-e. Retrieved 2017-01-02.
  35. ^ "Inheritance". whitney.org. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  36. ^ "Black American Portraits". LACMA. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  37. ^ "Fantasy America". The Andy Warhol Museum. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  38. ^ "List Projects: Kambui Olujimi". MIT List Visual Arts Center. Retrieved 2017-01-02.
  39. ^ "Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time". Blanton Museum of Art. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  40. ^ Purcell, Barbara (March 15, 2019). "Kambui Olujimi Speaks Art to Power in "Zulu Time"". www.austinchronicle.com. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  41. ^ "Skywriters & Constellations". www.newarkmuseum.org. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  42. ^ "Art installation revels in the intersection of art and technology | Video". NJTV News. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  43. ^ "events - Sharjah Art Foundation". sharjahart.org. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  44. ^ Das, Jareh (2022-06-14). "Dak'Art Shines a Light on Contemporary Art in Senegal". Frieze. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  45. ^ "When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting". Zeitz MOCAA. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  46. ^ "OSL 03: Kambui Olujimi / Public readings from "Wayward North" and dialogue with Anna Khimasia". Events Calendar. 2017-11-13. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  47. ^ "Visiting Artist Speaker Series, Fall 2018 | ubART Clone". Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  48. ^ "Kambui Olujimi". www.themodern.org. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
  49. ^ "Visiting Lecture Series". RISD Glass. Retrieved 2019-03-13.
  50. ^ Aranke, Sampada; Volk, Gregory; Kolb, Leah (2017). Kambui Olujimi : Zulu time. Madison: Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. ISBN 9780913883389. OCLC 981948700.
  51. ^ "Kambui Olujimi: WALK WITH ME Catalog". Project for Empty Space. Retrieved 2024-01-14.
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