Meet Odera Igbokwe | Painter & Illustrator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Odera Igbokwe and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Odera, have there been any changes in how you think about work-life balance?
In my earliest foundation years, everything was so new and exciting. I was voracious to improve my skills and to make new images. I dedicated most of my waking hours to foundation training and the necessities of being human. I started to recalibrate myself during art school, when people would ask
“what are your interests?”
“Painting and drawing.”
“Yeah but what do you for fun?”
“Painting and drawing!”
“Okay but what do you do to relax?”
“Painting and drawing…”

In those moments I knew I needed to find a balance. A new way to activate and crystallize experiences.
My first breakthrough to finding that balance was joining a neighboring university’s dance/theatre company as I was at art school. It was still intensive creative work, but it was different enough from my studio time as a painter/illustrator. It also helped that I had no professional goals or pressure as a dancer. It was all about movement, kinetic connection, and embodiment.

In those moments I thought my life experiences cannot exclusively be isolation in the the studio making things. Too much of that creates a limitation to the work and.

Over time, I have implemented more structured working hours. And if there are moments of needing to work more, then I give myself permission if I find a flow or groove. And even more specifically, I think that finding the nuances of dedication and discipline outside the context of capitalistic virtue signals of hard work, have been critical in protecting my balance, my peace, my body, my spirit, and thus the artwork.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My name is Odera Igbokwe and I am a painter and artist located on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations people. I create paintings that explore embodied cosmologies, reclamations of ancestral practices, and communal futurity from the lens of the Black Queer imagination.

I find that my work is all about creating access points, and new nodes in the Odera Igbokwe constellation, and then pouring that into the collective conscioussness. In my earliest years, I was really called to drawing through my love of videogames, comics, anime, and cartoons. The throughline amongst the media I was consuming, were the archetypes of transformation, cosmic awakenings, and finding the divine in the everyday.

In my early professional years, I tried to mold and meld my paintings into the Fantasy genre. But the more I painted, the more I found that they were accessing something ancestral and more dynamic than the confines of genre checkpoints. Since then I have been filled with lots of gratitude for the special moments like gifting paintings to Beyoncé and Solange, solo exhibitions, viral moments from recreating the cast of Sailor Moon as Black Femmes, to the joy of seeing a Black Queer youth encountering my works for the first time.

Most recently, I have been working on two bodies of work simultaneously. The first is a hybrid tarot-oracle deck that speak directly to spiritualities found across the African diaspora. And the other is about finding the divine, mythological, in the everyday of Black Queer intersectional realities.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My spouse for loving and supporting all the iterations of me.
My sister who is my first example of play as an access point to creativity.
And my Close Friends for witnessing all the mess and strange things I do that eventually crystallize into artwork.

Website: https://www.odera.net

Instagram: Oderaigbokwe

Other: https://patreon.com/odera

Image Credits
Odera Igbokwe
Dennis Ha