Hues of Black & Blue presents new work by artist Lola Ayisha Ogbara made during her year-long Ceramics Apprenticeship at the Art Center in 2021. Playing on the conceptual and literal contexts of the colors black and blue, Ogbara’s sculptural assemblages combine ceramic vessels, along with imagery, sound and domestic objects like stools and tables. Using familiar and unfamiliar spatial aesthetics while pointing out the complexities of emotion, Ogbara resists the flattening of Black feminine identity and reinforces its intersectional dynamism by complicating gazes that reinforce systems of oppression.
About Lola Ayisha Ogbara
Photography by Adrian Octavius Walker
LOLA AYISHA OGBARA (cultural worker & artist) born and raised in Chicago, Illinois holds many talents under her belt, i.e. sculpture, sound, design, photography and installation art. “My practice explores the multifaceted implications and ramifications of being in regards to the Black experience. I work with clay as a material in order to emphasize a necessary fragility which symbolizes an essential contradiction implicit in empowerments”. Ogbara holds a Bachelor of Arts in Arts Entertainment & Media Management from Columbia College Chicago in 2013 and a MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University Sam Fox School of Art & Design.
In 2017, Ogbara co-founded Artists in the Room, a collective of artists and scholars who host artists, emerging and established, in hopes of serving as a catalyst for artist development and networking. Ogbara has also received residencies, awards and speaking engagements, including but not limited to, the Multicultural Fellowship sponsored by the NCECA 52nd Annual Conference, the Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture Residency at the University of Chicago, and If It Wasn’t for the Woman: Reimagining Portraiture and Power lecture at the St. Louis Art Museum.
Ogbara has exhibited in art spaces across the country and is currently based in Chicago, Illinois.
