October 7, 2020

Odita spoke with reporter Tom McGlynn, examining his work in the context of The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment Series.

From The Brooklyn Rail:

"Over the last few decades I’ve tracked the way in which Odita has brought a renewed sense of purpose to abstract painting. In both his individual paintings on canvas and in his wall-sized commissions he exerts a rigorous draftsmanship and a very particular palette that I was anxious to discover more about. Working in the general vicinity of formal abstraction myself, I was curious to hear another such painter’s take on the continued valency of abstraction: its purpose past “purposelessness” perhaps. In our present moment of hyper-pluralistic aesthetic investigation (and social and political upheaval and evolution) Odita explores with me here that limit where the assumptions of the abstract painterly tradition ends, and the potentialities of its extended relevance begin."

Then I started to realize that any color is African color. You just have to be able to go beyond these preconditions that limit your thinking.

Odili Donald Odita MFA '90