INTERVIEW WITH BOLUWATIFE OYEDIRAN

 

I think I’ve been an artist for most of my life, since when I was a child. Everybody has that story of them making stick drawings while they were very young, before they got better at drawing, and then moved on to something else. But, professionally, I became an artist during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was then I could say that I discovered what it is that artists do. And since then, I’ve been on a journey to finding my style and voice as a visual artist. 

 

 

Currently, I make figurative paintings, mostly. But I write short stories on the side; I dabble in fiction. During my MFA program at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] I tried to incorporate some of my short fictions into my paintings, which led to works like The Transfiguration (2023-24) which is part of my latest exhibition Inverted Blackness.

 

My creative process has evolved over these last few years partly because I’m still discovering myself as an artist. I think I have the potential to do more than I’m doing, and the more I discover myself, the more I evolve. For instance, in my next series I have plans to make some landscape paintings, in connection to my experience as an African immigrant living in America. So, I’ve been studying a lot of Monet and Van Gogh. I don’t believe there’s one medium to say something, so at times I’m looking for another medium to say what I’m saying in my paintings or writings. As Lynette Yiadom-Boakye famously said: “I write the things I cannot paint and paint the things I cannot write.”

 

 

I was inspired by my new life in America. I had assumptions about this country before I came, especially concerning how I’d be treated as a Black person from Africa, because I came two years after George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery were murdered. But along the line I realized that I was experiencing a peculiar kind of blackness, one that was quite different from that of Black/African Americans. So, I decided to make work about that, to highlight my experience, my Africanness, and how it is a distinct classification of blackness in America.

 

 

I came to the negative filter by accident. A year ago, I was working on Photoshop when I mistakenly pressed the wrong command, and the picture I was working on, of a group of African boys, suddenly turned negative, resulting in a glow of luminous blue figures. I froze. Their black bodies had transformed into something otherworldly, emitting white light, like in some bioluminescent planktons found in deep oceans. The darker parts of the image, as well as the shadows, had taken on light as well. The parts of their bodies with lighter values took on shades of cerulean and phthalo blue. The inverted image rendered the features of the boys alienlike: their nails were dark blue; their pupils and irises were white, appearing in their heads as tiny bulbs, like the robotic eyes of a cyborg. Their blackness was maintained, but their hairs were gray. Their arms and legs looked like tubes of cathode light. What I stumbled on was a filter that allowed for the inversion of digital images from positive to negative. On the surface, there appeared to be nothing fascinating about it.

But that simple process of photographic manipulation visualized something I was experiencing: a change in the way that I’d been perceiving myself, an alien body, since arrival in America. However, I did not develop the link between the inverted image and my immigrant experience immediately, not until months later, when I came up with a concept I called “Inverted Blackness”. This concept explains that living in America as an African immigrant has manipulated my identity in ways that I cannot fully comprehend, and that using the inverted filter, a photographic manipulation of digital images, is fitting of the visual description of my experience.

 

 

In 2019, while still an undergraduate student in Nigeria, I had studied a course called “American Literature”. We read the works of Toni Morrison, Phyllis Wheatley, and Zora Neale Hurston, amongst many others. But what engaged my curiosity was the history of the forced migrations of Africans to America via the transatlantic slave trade, a history that, until then, I half-believed was a myth, a history that was barely taught in Nigerian schools. I read a few books and saw several movies about this history, notably The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789); Roots (1977); Twelve Years a Slave (2013); The Birth of a Nation (2016); and Harriet (2019). 

When I arrived in the US in 2022, I became a part of the vast Black population in America. I did not think of myself as African any longer. I could not. This was two years following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, incidents that in part shaped my artistic practice while I was still in Ghana, incidents that instilled in me the consciousness of my blackness in the wider world. Up until that point, my practice had been about America (and the experiences of African Americans) from the point of view of an outsider. In Ghana, I had made paintings of random Black people standing in cotton fields. I also made text paintings, some of which said, in stenciled texts: “WE DO NOT RECOGNIZE THE BODY OF EMMETT TILL”; “DEAR WHITE AMERICA”; and “THEY WILL NEVER LET A BLACK MAN BE CAPTAIN AMERICA”. I was never bothered that none of the experiences that contextualized these phrases had anything to do with me as an African. Black people were being victimized in America, the country I longed to go. Their experiences were presages of what could happen to me when I got there. I made works about my presumed future in the context of what presently happened to them.

 

 

As time passed, during my stay in the United States, I realized two things: that I was not Black in America in the African American sense, and that majority of the individuals depicted in the canon of Black figuration, which served as a template for my artistic practice, only looked like me, they were not me. When I look at a Kerry James Marshall painting, for example, I see people with whom I share the same skin color. But the general and peculiar experiences of the figures depicted, the nationality and culture that raised them, barely correlate with mine. In fact, when Marshall began to depict black people in literal black, he did not particularly have people like me in mind. I began to wonder if there was ever going to be a distinct and unique way to represent people like me—Black immigrants who have come to America by way of selective mobility and who find themselves constantly struggling to adjust to life here, socially, economically, and culturally. 

 

 

Human experience. I want to make works that deeply communicate the human experience, vis-à-vis the experience of the African immigrant adjusting to life in America, one who constantly finds themselves in opposition, disillusion, agreement and disagreement with the tenets of this country.

 

 

My long-term goal is to be able to make works about the African experience in America as much and as deeply as I can. My intention is to document this experience, making use of all the medium that I’m capable of, including painting, sculpting, photographing, writing—even film. Until I’ve curated my own Schindler’s List of African immigrants in America. I am deeply inspired by the work of American rapper Kendrick Lamar who has successfully made music about the Black experience in America and whose work and artistry is deeply felt and highly revered in his culture and community of Compton, California. When I study someone like Lamar, I tell myself that that’s the kind of stuff I would like to make in my practice.