Songs from Life
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
2025
In Odili Donald Odita’s new large-scale commission in MoMA’s lobby, bright colors and abstract patterns create a cascading kaleidoscope. And for the first time in the artist’s unfolding process, music serves as the primary source of inspiration. “Music inspires me to think through problems in my paintings,” Odita has said.
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Infinite Horizon
George C. Young US Courthouse & Federal Building, Orlando, FL
2013
With the title, I want to address the Court's ability to help people look tonew and different possibilities for restructuring one's financial life afterbankruptcy. The title plays on the idea of the Court's purpose, which is tosettle bankruptcy matters, and in essence, to give hope for new horizons. Theinstallation takes the notion of "infinite horizon" to its aesthetic end throughthe pairing of many different horizontal lines within the painted areas. Thisnotion repeats throughout each painted panel, and ultimately with the fullinstallation itself existing as a horizon line within the context of the wood. In this ultimate context, we have a horizon and its double, yin becoming yang.
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Time and Time
New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY
2012
Being a hospital patient is usually not a pleasant experience. For some patients at New-York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, stays were not enhanced by the view out the window: a bland white industrial wall.The drab barrier – erected in 2010 a stone’s throw from patient rooms on the fourth and fifth floors to hide newer mechanical systems – presented such a dismal sight that nurses would avoid putting patients in those rooms. Whenever space became available, they would move patients from the west side, with the view of the plain wall, to the coveted east side, where light bounces off the waves of the East River and a steady stream of boat traffic passes Roosevelt Island.
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Heaven's Gate
Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA
2012
To say that Savannah is a planned and designed city would be an understatement. It is obvious to see this fact in the care taken to maintain the buildings and the surrounding environment of this city. This notion of planning and design is at the center of my thoughts concerning the creation of a large-scale wall installation at SCAD. As a campus, SCAD is a beautiful and very idyllic setting, perfectly composed and situated squarely within an established history of the city.
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Kaleidoscope
MTA 20th Avenue D Train, New York, NY
2012
Kaleidoscope, created by Odili Donald Odita, is a laminated glass installation spanning throughout the elevated station platforms, which cross the commercial street and neighborhood hub of 20th Avenue on the D Line at the 20th Avenue station in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
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Time Curve
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland
2011
The wall painting, Time Curve, by Odili Donald Odita created at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art for the ARS 11 exhibition, opened to the public on April 15, 2011 in Helsinki. With more than 69 colors, the installation covers approximately 100 square meters of the Panorama space of Kiasma. The color choice was affected by the April light the artist experienced during his initial stay in Helsinki. Odita hopes that visitors will be able to experience something new when seeing his installation. "In the end, each viewer decides how to take in the created space, but I hope I can make it interesting enough to make them see themselves and their surroundings in a new and different light." The ARS 11 exhibition investigates Africa in contemporary art. The exhibition features some 300 works by a total of 30 artists. The Kiasma Theatre also has a programme of ARS events and performances. In addition to artists living in Africa, the show also features others who live outside the continent, artists of African descent as well as Western artists who address African issues in their work. The themes of the exhibition, such as migration, the environment, and urban life are global issues that affect us all. Memory, recollection, the simultaneous presence of different histories, and layers of time are some of the common starting points of the work of many artists featured in the exhibition. At best ARS 11 can produce new understanding and also provide background information on the situation in today’s Africa.
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Forever
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
2011
Inspiration for this installation project came from a book about the Black Masking Indians of Mardi Gras, New Orleans given to Odita by artist, Willie Birch. This began Odita’s investigation at NOMA into the history of the Black Masking Indians of New Orleans, along with considerations on the devastation and rebuild of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
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Up and Away
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ
2009
Odili Donald Odita’s mural Up and Away spans two floors in the common room of Butler College. Color and shape play a central role in Odita’s mural: his palette is bright, almost psychedelic, and the composition brings life and dynamism to otherwise static white walls. Odita says that he was inspired by the design as well as by the function of the building. He was particularly interested in creating something conducive to the activities that occur at Butler, such as studying, communicating, and living. As a whole, the mural suggests an energy rising through the building, a force moving up the stairs toward the door. The title Up and Away is both optimistic and aspirational. It might make us think of abstract concepts like growth and flight or such concrete references as Superman. Ultimately, Up and Away refers to the experience of a student who, upon learning, leaves for higher pursuits.
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Post Perfect
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA
2009
I first visited Yerba Buena in April to get a look at the spaces and to see where I would be working. I thought I would like to work in the Entrance/Lobby space, but that was taken. Then I hoped to work in one of the two big exhibition rooms, but those were also taken. What was left was the Anteroom, and for me, this became a blessing.
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Third Space
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA
2008
Odili Donald Odita's large-scale abstract wall paintings operate at the intersection of Western modernism and African culture. 'Third Space', a symphony of irregularly shaped, fractured planes in 115 shades of housepaint, takes full advantage of the ICA Ramp's soaring, sloping architecture. Borrowing strategies of destabilized perception from Op art — a tradition condemned by formalist criticism — and adding narrative and multicultural inflection, Odita both embraces and critiques the modernist tradition. His vast, animated expanses of fragmented, rhythmic planes — equally informed by television test band patterns, African textiles, post-colonial discourses, sensory overload, and digital technology — speak to a contemporary experience of dislocation and decenteredness.
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Give Me Shelter
Venice Biennale 2007, 52nd International Art Exhibition. Venice, Italy.
2007
It was my wish to have my wall painting become an embrace on the viewer as they passed through the installation, with the wall color reflecting back onto them in their movement through this space. Ultimately, I wanted this embrace to be similar to how I felt embraced by Venice; with the wall installation, as with the city, giving shelter to all those who passed through it.
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Flow
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH
2007
In early October 2007, Odili Donald Odita began a month-long transformation of Kaplan Hall, the lobby of the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art designed by acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid. Odita named the resulting site-specific wall painting FLOW. “Coming into the space, I felt very energized by the design and the architecture,” Odita says. “What I responded to in the space was the energy of being inside and outside at the same time.”
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Equalizer
Studio Museum in Harlem, NY
2007
This site-specific mural inaugurates the new Project Space at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Equalizer, by artist Odili Donald Odita (b. 1966), tells of two moments of migration from the African continent to the Americas. The first is the transatlantic slave trade, of the early 1500s to almost 1900, which remains the largest forced migration in world history. The second, and more recent, is the contemporary relocation and emigration of Africans in search of political and economic stability.
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