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Precious Okoyomon’s Creative Destruction
Cutting and sewing stuffed animals in their Brooklyn apartment or working on-site at arts spaces around the world, artist Precious Okoyomon embraces play and dreaming with a critical edge, exploring questions of freedom, racialization, and the subtle violence of the everyday. The artist’s work ranges from allegorical gardens filled with poisonous flowers, invasive plants, and butterflies to oversized teddy bears in states of undress that reflect tensions between innocence and violence. This short documentary film follows the artist’s unique creative trajectory from early experiences gardening with their grandmother and collecting childhood toys to later creating immersive installations at celebrated arts institutions like the São Paulo Bienal and the Whitney Biennial. “Most of my work is me just thinking through my experiences,” says Okoyomon. “Everything is extremely vulnerable and personal in that way.” Embracing cycles of creation and destruction in their edenic gardens or tearing apart and then recombining stuffed animals to reflect on adult anxieties, Okoyomon mischievously provokes audiences to question contemporary society.
Credits
Director & Producer: Haimy Assefa. Executive Producer: Tina Kukielski. Series Producer: Nick Ravich. Editor: Katia Vannoy. Cinematography: Rodrigo Valencia & Haimy Assefa. Additional Cinematography: Sean Hanley & César Luiz Leite. Assistant Camera: Rafael Alvarado & Bruna Lucheze Freire. Associate Producer: Andrea Chung. Associate Curator: Jurrell Lewis. Design & Graphics: Chips. Colorist: Fabiana Javitt. Sound Design & Mix: Katia Vannoy. Assistant Editor: Stephanie Cen.
Artwork & Archival Media Courtesy: Precious Okoyomon.
Thanks: Brock Bierly, Collin Blendell, Lenna Christakis, Ryn Doherty, Gladstone Gallery, Gravity, Rachael Griswold, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Mendes Wood DM, Paris, São Paulo Art Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art.
New York Close Up is made possible with support from Deborah Beckmann and Jacob Kotzubei, Jessica and Natan Bibliowicz, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the Henry Nias Foundation, and individual contributors.
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Precious Okoyomon was born in 1993 in London and lives and works in New York City. The artist received their BA from Shimer College in 2013. Okoyomon works in sculpture, installation, and poetry: ranging from carefully researched gardens filled with invasive weeds, poisonous plants, and butterflies to the transformation of stuffed animals into fantastical beings. The artist frames childhood toys and non-human life as mirrors to better understand the human condition, whether by exploring complex relationships to beauty, violence, life, and death, or by confronting political structures such as antiblackness and colonial power. Balancing sharp critical inquiry with mischievous playfulness, the artist presents viewers with opportunities to reflect on our entanglement with history, the natural world, and one another.
“With cuteness comes violence. With innocence comes destruction. What does it mean to know that? To live with it? To have it be in the body?”
Precious Okoyomon