Boluwatife Oyediran

Biography

Boluwatife Oyediran - Hold Me Here and There, 2025

BOLUWATIFE OYEDIRAN WAS BORN IN NIGERIA IN 1997. HE LIVES AND WORKS IN RHODE ISLAND, 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.

Boluwatife Oyediran has had two other solo gallery exhibitions: Point of Correction at AFIKARIS Gallery in Paris in January 2022 and For Boiz Like Me Who've Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf at 1957 Gallery in Accra in the summer of 2022. His work has also been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Krems, Austria, as part of the exhibition The New African Portraiture. Shariat Collections curated by Ekow Eshun.

His work recently joined the collection of the Mattatuck Museum (Connecticut, USA). He is currently preparing to begin an MFA in Creative Writing at Stony Brook (Iowa, USA), further expanding his engagement with narrative and literary forms.

Two of his artworks are currently presented at Fondation Blachère in France, as part of the exhibition Afroblue, on view until September 2026.

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