Boluwatife Oyediran

Biography

Boluwatife Oyediran - Hold Me Here and There, 2025

BOLUWATIFE OYEDIRAN WAS BORN IN NIGERIA IN 1997. HE LIVES AND WORKS IN IOWA, USA.

A graduate of a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was awarded the Presidential Fellowship, Boluwatife Oyediran is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice combines painting, writing, and photography. His work reflects on his deep commitment to exploring Black identity, which he reimagines and reorients within the canons of history, religion and Western art.

His continued conceptual research led him to develop the notion of “Inverted Blackness.” In these new portraits, Black figures are painted in negative; their bodies are blue and luminous, as though going through a transformative and otherworldly experience. The people who populate his paintings are immigrants who left the African continent to settle in the United States. This new series was the subject of a solo exhibition at the AFIKARIS gallery in 2024, entitled Inverted Blackness and accompanied by a publication of the same name.

His work has since been exhibited in major institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Krems (Austria) in 2023 as part of The New African Portraiture. Shariat Collections, curated by Ekow Eshun, and in 2026 at the Fondation Blachère (France) within the exhibition Afroblue. His work was also included in About Face: 250 Years of American Portraits at the Mattatuck Museum (Connecticut, USA). Both institutions have recently acquired works by the artist for their collections.

Oyediran is currently the Sonny Mehta Fellow in Fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop (Iowa, USA), where he is working on his first novel.

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