Precious Okoyomon. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
New York’s Frieze Art Fair opens today, but the prestigious Frieze Artist Award commission, a performance featuring artist and poet Precious Okoyomon, has already come and gone, staged quietly last week before a small, socially distanced crowd.
When art collectors descend on the Shed for the city’s first in-person art fair since March 2020, they will only be able to experience
This God Is a Slow Recovery (2021) in video form, playing at the fair and streaming online.
A cacophony of sound and music, the piece saw Okoyomon and other performers perched on black platforms decorated with silver and camouflage netting in the center of the Shed’s performance hall. A collaboration with Los Angeles-based industrial designer Jonathan Olivares, the set was meant to recall the collapse of the Tower of Babel, encircled with branches, leaves, and a scattering of yellow flowers.
The Artist Who Transforms Galleries Into Forests and Fields
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/t-magazine/precious-okoyomon-artist-shed.html
The Artist Who Transforms Galleries Into Forests and Fields
Precious Okoyomon’s vast installations, which often incorporate plants as well as poetry and sculpture, celebrate the chaos of nature, and warn against its destruction.
The artist Precious Okoyomon in their Brooklyn studio.Credit.Emiliano Granado
By Coco Romack
Published May 3, 2021Updated May 5, 2021
“It was the freshest breath of air I’d taken all year, in that closed room with all the snails,” says the artist Precious Okoyomon, recalling the setting of their recent exhibition “Earthseed,” at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst’s Zollamt gallery. The entire floor of the former customs office was covered with several feet of topsoil and in it Okoyomon, 27, had planted a dense green blanket of young kudzu plants, the cultivation of which is illegal in much of th
6 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now
Gerald Jackson’s collages; Precious Okoyomon’s reimagined ecosystem; Damien Davis’s sculptures; Beverly Buchanan’s “shacks”; and more.
Daisy May Sheff’s “Stiff and Tawny Wavelets,” from 2021, at White Columns.Credit.Daisy May Sheff
April 28, 2021
Through May 15. White Columns, 91 Horatio Street, Manhattan, (212) 924-4212, whitecolumns.org.
In its pairings of large and small shows, White Columns has come up with some extraordinary combinations, but its present one is especially excellent. The larger exhibition reintroduces the veteran artist and poet Gerald Jackson, now in his mid-80s, whose work was fearlessly multimedia long before it became the thing to do. The smaller show, “A Mountain Girl With Skyblue Teeth,” is the New York debut of a young painter, Daisy May Sheff, whose layered fantasies exude an overheated Fauvism of oranges, pinks, purples and greens populated by eccentric personages all in a style best descr
An Eerie Landscape Of Ashes And Ladybugs Beckons In The East Village View all 5
A physical post-Covid landscape and a powerful place of mourning has been created inside Performance Space New York in the East Village.
Artist Precious Okoyomon (they/their) made the installation on commission after winning the Frieze Festival’s Emerging Artist Award. Called “Fragmented Body Perceptions as Higher Vibration Frequencies to God” the title is from their own poem this eerie, otherworldly place is Okoyomon’s reaction to COVID.
“I just think they’re one of the most interesting artists out there,” says Frieze jury chair Jenny Schlenzka, executive artistic director of Performance Space and curator of Okoyomon’s installation.