Holding contemporary tragedies within sacred diasporic stories.

For BOMB’s Oral History Project, Odita, known for his geometric paintings, recalls growing up as a refugee from the Nigerian Civil War and the influence of his father, a historian of African art.

Lake Pred was no lake but a precondition, / predecessor assault that kept coming, / preterite arrest we couldn’t quit.

The malleable biographies of cultural objects.

The mask as multiple levels of embodiment.

“I don’t want the kind of career where everything is sensible and safe; I’d rather suffer through the anxiety of wondering where I’m going next than suffer the boredom of dancing in the same safe square.”

“The reward is getting through the tough stuff. And that’s what’s perplexing about the art thing. When I was going to school there were kids that could draw their asses off. There were kids that were better draftsman than me, for certain. But no one was more determined than me.”

Potential Futures / Black Receipts

From Lagos to LA, a young painter’s images resonate with meaning, both personal and political.

For her residency at the New Museum, Leigh looks at the act of healing through the lens of black female caregivers, educators, and intellectuals.

Pacale Marthine Tayou is a Cameroonian artist based in Belgium. His work has appeared in documenta11 (2002) in Kassel, two Venice Biennales (2005 and 2009), and numerous international exhibitions. Recent solo exhibitions took place at the Serpentine Galleries, London, and Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, both in 2015.

“I’m fighting between control and letting nature take its course.”

Cinematic choreography and the art of showing, not telling.

Black Nationalism, rural Brooklyn, faces, and monoliths.

This is the type of record that will slap cultural essentialists in the face.

Dutty Wine, radical action, phrase books, voices on television, and America’s orphaned tongue.

“The collage works are going to be life-size. My work increased in scale when I realized that I wanted people to enter the worlds or to see them almost like dioramas— these places that they could be immersed into, with their own social structures and their eco-systems.”

Radcliffe Bailey on artistic and regional labels, testing his own DNA, aging, and the power familial ancestry holds on his practice.

Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina is inexhaustible, a public intellectual very much engaged with the literary and political worlds. His memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, published this July by Graywolf Press, chronicles the multiplicity of his middle-class African childhood: home squared, we call it, your clan, your home, the nation of your origin.