Toyin Ojih Odutola is third in rank on the record of the highest-paid artists in Nigeria. This is because she recently sold her drawing ‘Compound Leaf’ at Sotheby’s for £471,000 (roughly N215 million). The News Agency of Nigeria reports that this record-breaking sale puts Ojih Odutola behind a fellow female artist, Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, and the legendary artist Ben Enwonwu.
A Nigerian-American contemporary visual artist, Odutola, moved from Nigeria to America at the age of five and became aware of her ‘blackness,’ just like every other African in the diaspora, and this made her question her identity. With this, she was able to use art as a coping mechanism, and then, as years passed by, it turned out to be an “investigative, learning activity” for her.
On how art helped her escape, Odutola says to Vogue:
“I was obsessed. Capturing everything I saw and being fascinated with the incredibly simple task of looking at something and transmitting it onto paper. It’s immediate magic.”
The artist creates multimedia drawings on several kinds of surfaces, thereby investigating formulaic representations and how such images can be unreliable, systemic, and socially coded.
Toyin Ojih Odutola has participated in exhibitions at various institutions, such as The Drawing Center, New York (2018—19); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017—18); and the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2016). In addition, she has exhibited at the following places: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2015); Studio Museum Harlem, New York (2015, 2012); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2013); Menil Collection, Houston (2012); Philadelphia Museum of Art; Princeton University Art Museum; Spencer Museum of Art; Honolulu Museum of Art; and the National Museum of African Art (Smithsonian).
She has permanent collections like the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
