{"id":1851434,"date":"2026-03-27T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1851434"},"modified":"2026-03-27T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T05:00:00","slug":"precious-okoyomons-whitney-biennial-installation-is-a-true-shocker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1851434","title":{"rendered":"Precious Okoyomon’s Whitney Biennial Installation Is a True Shocker"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/0040_260325-Precious-Okoyomon-Whitney-Biennial.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tEarlier this month, the Whitney Biennial went on view to the usual amount of fanfare\u2014but one work was notably missing from the show. That work, a room-filling installation by Precious Okoyomon featuring stuffed animals and racist dolls suspended from the ceiling by nooses, was initially meant to appear in the lobby. But shortly before the exhibition opened to the press, the artist and the show\u2019s curators pulled the plug on that plan.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe issue, Okoyomon told ARTnews<\/em> this week, was not the piece\u2019s disturbing subject matter but a more practical problem: they felt they needed more space to realize such an ambitious project. \u201cIt didn\u2019t work,\u201d they said of the initial lobby idea. The dolls and animals \u201cneeded to be lower. You have to engage with them in a place where you can look at them and be with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWe met on the Whitney Museum\u2019s the eighth floor, where their installation, titled Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid <\/em>(2026), finally went on view Wednesday. Cupping their poodle, Gravity, they seemed proud of the fully realized version, and they had every right to be\u2014the installation is one of the great pieces of this Whitney Biennial.<\/p>\n

\n\tAn expanded and readapted version of a work previously shown in 2023 at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, a vaunted contemporary art museum in Austria, Okoyomon\u2019s piece features around 50 stuffed animals and dolls that dangle from the floor\u2019s rafters. Sunlight pours in from a skylight that is not regularly exposed to the public, underscoring the sense that this installation is oddly beautiful, despite an uncomfortable mix of cutesiness and queasiness that has become Okoyomon\u2019s signature and made them one of the most exciting sculptors working today.<\/p>\n

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Precious Okoyomon with their installation Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid<\/em> (2026), now on view in the Whitney Biennial.<\/span>Photo Christopher Garcia-Valle for ARTnews<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tTorn-open plushies, uncontrollable kudzu, and piles of earthen matter sculpted to form deities have all appeared in Okoyomon\u2019s work, which has been shown in venues ranging from the Venice Biennale to the Palais de Tokyo. According to Okoyomon, binding much of their work is an inquiry into violence and healing. \u201cSo much of my stuff comes from endlessly processing,\u201d Okoyomon said. \u201cAdam Phillips says we never get over the masochism of our childhood. And it\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSome of those stuffed animals in the Whitney work were Okoyomon\u2019s childhood toys, while others were thrifted in the Midwest, the region where the artist was raised. The dolls, meanwhile, came from an antiques dealer in Astoria whose shop contains \u201cinsane, cursed\u201d items, as Okoyomon put it. Affixed with taxidermy feathers harvested from dead pets by one of Okomoyon\u2019s friends, all these objects together form a haunting installation about the little bursts of carnage that happen everywhere all the time. In a nod to all that bloodshed, Okoyomon has spliced up these stuffed animals and dolls and recombined their parts to form new beings.<\/p>\n

\n\tOkoyomon, who has a habit of quoting from philosophers they admire, said, \u201cThese sculptures are in a state of arrested transcendence. What does it mean to be an angel in the Miltonian sense? You can\u2019t kill an angel and the continuous gravity that\u2019s held within it! I\u2019m thinking through if my work is ever separate from the self and the everyday relational violence [of] Blackness.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid<\/em> includes parts from racist dolls, some of which are exhibited in corners.<\/span>Courtesy Whitney Museum<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDrew Sawyer, who curated the Whitney Biennial with Marcela Guerrero, told ARTnews<\/em> that Okoyomon produces \u201cbeautiful installations that also have these very sinister, dark narratives.\u201d By way of example, he pointed out that the plush animals in the Whitney work show signs of use. \u201cThey clearly have been loved,\u201d he said, \u201cso there\u2019s very tender part of it. But they\u2019ve been discarded, and these birds are dead. So, there is grief and violence, and they\u2019re hung from nooses, which have various connotations,\u201d such as lynchings and suicide.<\/p>\n

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Precious Okoyomon, When the Lambs Rise Up Against the Bird of Prey<\/em>, 2024.<\/span>Photo Dario Lasagni\/Courtesy New Museum<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tOkoyomon\u2019s work is often characterized by a slippery, menacing quality that is evident both in the Whitney piece and in When the Lambs Rise Up Against the Bird of Prey<\/em> (2024), a work currently on view at the recently reopened New Museum downtown. The New Museum work features a Black figure outfitted with a sheer white dress and animal\u2019s ears. (The dress looks a bit like the lacy one Okoyomon wore when I met them.) This figure stares directly at its viewer before making jerky movements\u2014it\u2019s an animatronic, but you don\u2019t necessarily know that going in. The piece is situated in a recess whose walls are lined with a tufted material. \u201cIt\u2019s pink fiberglass insulation,\u201d Okoyomon said, laughing. \u201cIf you get close and breathe it in, it will kill you.\u201d (The piece is not toxic to visitors because it was placed in the alcove far out of reach, a New Museum representative told me.)<\/p>\n

\n\tDid they want to shock with a work like this one? I posed the question to Okoyomon, who said, \u201cIt\u2019s not provoking. I call it a real, slow rearrangement of everyday desire.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Precious Okoyomon, in the belly of the sun endless<\/em>, 2025.<\/span>\u00a9Precious Okoyomon and Kunsthaus Bregenz\/Courtesy the artist and Kunsthaus Bregenz<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tA gardener and a poet as well as an artist, Okoyomon has often focused on the land around them. Born in 1993 in London, they grew up searching for what they described as \u201ccontinuous space\u201d as their family relocated many times over, moving between the UK, Nigeria, and the US. \u201cNo matter where we went, there was always semi-nature,\u201d they said. \u201cWe lived in Texas, and then Ohio, where there were woods. Sometimes, I don\u2019t understand the people around me. Everything might change all the time.\u201d In an attempt to find some fixity, they grew to love the earth as a kid, writing poems that they buried in the ground.<\/p>\n

\n\tOkoyomon went on to study philosophy, graduating from Shimer College in Naperville, Illinois, in 2014, but they found that they \u201chave a different relationship to language\u201d than most who work in that field. They do not view their art as being entirely separate from the poetry they continue to write. \u201cIt\u2019s a relational way of seeing the world,\u201d they said of their practice. \u201cIt\u2019s just witnessing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring the late 2010s, as their artistic career began to take off, their work grew up bigger, reaching a new apex in 2020 with a show at the MMK museum in Frankfurt, Germany. Organized by Susanne Pfeffer, one of today\u2019s most lauded curators, and staged before Okoyomon had turned 30, the show featured a garden installation dominated by Resistance is an atmospheric condition<\/em> (2020), a sprawl of kudzu, using an invasive species lured from Japan to the US as a metaphor for Blackness. Once the plant started growing, it was tough to stop it. By the show\u2019s end, it had nearly overtaken some of the sculptures set within it. The work ended up ranking on ARTnews<\/em>\u2019s list of the best works of the 21st century so far, making Okoyomon one of the youngest artists represented in the survey.<\/p>\n

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Precious Okoyomon, Resistance is an atmospheric condition<\/em>, 2020.<\/span>Diana Pfammatter<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u201cI saw the MMK show, and I was completely blown away,\u201d said Cecilia Alemani, a curator who would go on to include Okoyomon in her 2022 Venice Biennale. Positioned at the end of the Arsenale, one of the Biennale\u2019s two main venues, was an unforgettable installation by Okoyomon, who filled a space formerly used to hold weaponry with dirt, plants, and live butterflies. \u201cIt was challenging, because growing a garden in March in Venice in a 15th-century building is not exactly an easy task. But we worked hard to grow plants in a greenhouse, and they made these sculptures out of wool,\u201d Alemani recalled, noting that the kudzu there also threatened to consume the site where it was set.<\/p>\n

\n\tOkoyomon\u2019s work, Alemani continued, \u201cis not about asking: which is stronger, nature or man, life or death? It\u2019s about hybridity. They accept these in-between spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Precious Okoyomon, To See the Earth before the End of the World<\/em>, 2022.<\/span>Clelia Cadamuro\/\u00a9Precious Okoyomon\/Courtesy Venice Biennale<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe transcendence of Okoyomon\u2019s art can often mask the ugliness that bubbles just beneath its surface. Speaking of their Whitney work, Okoyomon noted that the stuffed animals appear to float, a choice they compared to the effect of racism. \u201cWhite supremacy is an abduction of everyday gravity\u2014it stops the sky and structure,\u201d they said. Then, speaking of the stuffed animals, they noted, \u201cThey\u2019re all pieces of each other. They\u2019re all disassembled.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOkoyomon told me that they themselves are always trying to keep it together by focusing on a meditation practice that they practice every day. \u201cI\u2019m always trying to hack the predictive processing of my brain, to at least rest a little bit,\u201d Okoyomon said. \u201cI\u2019m trying to be in the present time, and that takes a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/0040_260325-Precious-Okoyomon-Whitney-Biennial.jpg?w=1024″] Earlier this month, the Whitney Biennial went on view to the usual amount of fanfare\u2014but one work was notably missing from the show. That work, a room-filling installation by Precious Okoyomon featuring stuffed animals and racist dolls suspended from the ceiling by nooses, was initially meant to appear in the lobby. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1851434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1851434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1851434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1851434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1851434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1851434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1851434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}