The Department of Art Visiting Artist Program is proud to welcome Woody De Othello, a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing. Known for his glazed ceramics and bronzes that interrogate the genre of “still life,” Othello creates animistic vessels based on domestic objects. The artist’s deep engagement with clay and its connection to homelands is integral to his practice. From the nkisi of Central Africa to the Indigenous Dagara cosmology of sub-Saharan Africa, Othello embraces the regenerative power of the material.
Othello’s sculptures, paintings and installations imagine a world in which the things that populate our domestic lives metamorphize into syncretic, humanoid objects. Working primarily in ceramic, wood and bronze, he creates assemblages of everyday artefacts — phones, television remotes, clocks, lamps, calendars, pipes, shoes, and light switches — that he stacks on glazed ceramic stools, chairs, radiators, and step ladders. “The objects mimic actions that humans perform,” says Othello. “They’re extensions of our own actions. We use phones to speak and to listen, clocks to tell time, vessels to hold things, and our bodies are indicators of all of those.”
Othello (b. 1991, Miami, FL) holds an MFA from the California College of Arts, San Francisco and BFA from Florida Atlantic University. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; ICA, Miami; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Seattle Art Museum; LACMA, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; San José Museum of Art, CA; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; and MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, Italy, and many more. Othello has exhibited widely in group exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Hayward Gallery, London; The Met, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial; 33rd Ljubljana Biennial, Slovenia; and Center for Craft in Asheville, NC, among others. Large-scale public art commissions include San Francisco International Airport; de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and Cityline, Sunnyvale. Othello lives and works in Oakland, CA.
[Pictured above: Artist Woody de Othello and his work The will to make things happen (2021). Whitney Biennial: Quiet as it's Kept, 2022. Photographed by Raul Valverde. Images courtesy of the artist.]
