Photography by Gina Grafos
"Blacker the Berry" (A Good Day to be Black & Sexy, series), 2020, Ceramic stoneware, 28" x 18" x 11"
In Lola Ogbara’s debut solo show Pleasure Is All Mine, she challenges stigmas associated with the Black femme experience through images and a variety of textures including those of clay and metal.
A Chicago native, Ogbara earned a master of fine arts at Washington University's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. After finishing her degree, she decided to stay in St. Louis because of the relationships she made and the possibility to create large-scale sculptures.
The inspiration for Pleasure Is All Mine came from Ogbara’s master’s thesis in which she examined identity in the context of race, gender, and sexuality. “I talked about being a daughter of a Nigerian immigrant and a Black American and how those identities informed my own life; the word ‘model’ and how we use that today in referencing one type of person; and the intellectual or physical pleasure and/or desire of the subjected,” she says. “I’m combining all those themes in the exhibition.”
Ogbara typically works in a variety of mediums including painting, mixed media, sculpture, photography, and illustration, and decides which to use based on the message she is trying to convey. “If I’m interested in texture, I’ll use ceramic,” she says.
In Pleasure Is All Mine, she distorts and manipulates through photographs, images that she has collaged, and clay sculptures with folds and curves. The result is provocative and leaves the viewer trying to make sense of their own viewership. “It’s a compilation of works that use this uttered and grotesque rhetoric as a visual aesthetic alongside this pleasure activist framework to imagine a new and unique lens” that refuses the traditional Western gaze on Black bodies. The exhibit seeks to fully humanize how Western society views Black femme bodies.
Pleasure Is All Mine runs through September 7 at the Kranzberg Art Foundation. Viewing appointments must be made in advance to ensure proper social distancing. Ogbara’s work is also being featured alongside Julian Curran and Emma Vidal in Exposure 21: Three Myths at Gallery 210 at University of Missouri St. Louis.
