Precious Okoyomon’s Whitney Biennial Installation Is a True Shocker

The Whitney Biennial opened with the usual fanfare earlier this month, but there was one work conspicuously missing from the show. The piece, a room-filling installation by Precious Okoyomon that features stuffed animals and racist dolls suspended from the ceiling by nooses, was originally intended to appear in the lobby. But shortly before the exhibition opened to the press, the artist and exhibition curator canceled the plans.

Okoyomon tells us about the problem art news This week, it’s not the piece’s unsettling theme, but a more practical one: they felt they needed more space to realize such an ambitious project. “It didn’t work,” they said of their original lobbying idea. Dolls and animals “need to be lower. You have to interact with them in a place where you can see them and be with them.”

We meet on the eighth floor of the Whitney Museum, where their installation is titled Everything is trying to kill you and you should be afraid (2026), finally on display Wednesday. Holding their poodle “Gravity,” they seemed proud of the fully realized version, which they had every right to be—the installation was one of the great works of this year’s Whitney Biennial.

Okoyomon’s work is an expanded and re-adapted version of a work shown in 2023 at the Kunsthalle Bregenz, Austria’s prestigious contemporary art museum, which includes about 50 stuffed animals and dolls suspended from the rafters on the floor. Sunlight pouring in from a skylight not often exposed to the public accentuates the installation’s unusually beautiful, albeit uncomfortable mix of cuteness and disgust that has become Okoyomon’s signature and makes them one of the most exciting sculptors working today.

Torn stuffed animals, uncontrollable kudzu, and mounds of earthy material carved into gods all appear in Okoyomon’s work, which has been exhibited at venues including the Venice Biennale and the Palais de Tokyo. Okoyomen said much of their work is an exploration of violence and healing. “A lot of my stuff comes from endless processing,” Okoyomon said. “Adam Phillips said we never get over the masochistic tendencies of childhood. It’s true.”

Some of the stuffed animals in Whitney’s work are toys from Okoyomon’s childhood, while others have been preserved from the Midwest where the artist grew up. The dolls, meanwhile, came from an antiques dealer in Astoria who, as Okoyomon put it, had “crazy, cursed” items hidden in his shop. One of Okomoyong’s friends collected feather specimens from dead pets, and together the objects form a haunting installation that speaks to the ubiquity of small-scale massacres. In a nod to all the bloodshed, Okoyomon splices these stuffed animals and dolls together and reassembles their parts to form new beings.

Okoyomon, who is accustomed to quoting the philosophers they admire, said: “These sculptures are in a state of bounded transcendence. What does it mean to be an angel in the Miltonian sense? You cannot kill an angel and the constant gravity involved in it! I am thinking about whether my work can be separated from the self and the violence of everyday relationships.” [of] black. “

says Drew Sawyer, who co-curated the Whitney Biennial with Marcela Guerrero art news Okoyomon creates “beautiful installations, but also these very sinister, dark narratives.” As an example, he points to the stuffed animals in the Whitney’s work that show signs of use. “They were obviously loved,” he said, “so there’s a very tender part to it. But they were discarded, and these birds died. So, there’s sadness and violence, and they’re hung from a noose, which has all sorts of meanings,” such as lynching and suicide.

Okoyomon’s work often has a sly, sinister quality that is evident in Whitney’s work as well as other works. When the lambs rise up against the birds of prey (2024), a work currently on display at the recently reopened New Museum downtown. The piece at the New Museum shows a black figure wearing a see-through white dress and animal ears. (The dress looks a bit like the lacy dress Okoyomon was wearing when I met them.) The figure looks directly at the viewer before making jerky movements—it’s an animatronic, but you wouldn’t necessarily know going in. The piece is located in a recess whose walls are lined with tufted material. “It’s pink fiberglass insulation,” Okyomon said with a laugh. “If you get close and breathe it in, it will kill you.”

Do they want to shock with a piece like this? I asked Okoyomen this question and he said, “It’s not exciting. I call it a real, slow rearrangement of everyday desires.”

As a gardener, poet and artist, Okoyomen often paid attention to the land around them. Born in London in 1993, their family moved several times while growing up, moving between the UK, Nigeria and the US, always looking for what they call “continuous space”. “Everywhere we go, there’s always a semi-natural feel,” they said. “We lived in Texas, then Ohio, where there were woods. Sometimes, I didn’t understand the people around me. Everything could be changing all the time.” In order to find something fixed, they grew up loving the earth, writing poems and burying them in the ground.

Okoyomon went on to study philosophy, graduating from Shimer College in Naperville, Illinois, in 2014, but found she had a “different relationship with language” than most people in the field. They did not consider their art to be entirely separate from the poetry they continued to create. “It’s a relational way of looking at the world,” they say of their practice. “It’s just testimony.”

As their artistic careers began to take off in the late 2010s, their work grew in scale, culminating in a 2020 exhibition at the MMK Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. Organized by Susanne Pfeffer, one of today’s most acclaimed curators, the exhibition was staged before Okoyomon turned 30 and is led by garden installations, Drag is an atmospheric condition (2020), a patch of kudzu, uses the metaphor of blackness as an invasive species lured to the United States from Japan. Once a plant starts growing, it’s difficult to stop it. By the end of the exhibition, it almost surpassed some of the sculptures within it. The final ranking of this work is art newsA ranking of the best works of the 21st century so far, making Okoyomon one of the youngest artists surveyed.

“I saw the MMK exhibition and was completely blown away,” said curator Cecilia Alemani, who later included Okoyomon in her 2022 Venice Biennale. In a haunting installation placed at the end of the Arsenale, one of the two main venues of the Biennale, Okoyomon filled the space previously used to store weapons with earth, plants and live butterflies. “It was challenging because it’s not easy to plant a garden in a 15th-century building in Venice in March. But we worked hard to grow plants in the greenhouse and they made these sculptures out of wool,” Alemanni recalled, noting that kudzu vines there also threatened its location.

Okoyomon’s work, Alemany continued, “is not about asking: Which is more powerful, nature or man, life or death? It’s about hybridity. They embrace these in-between spaces.”

The transcendence of Okoyomon’s art often masks the ugliness beneath its surface. Speaking of their Whitney piece, Okoyomon noted that the stuffed animals appear to be floating in the air, a choice they compared to the impact of racism. “White supremacy is a hijacking of everyday gravity—it blocks the sky and structures,” they said. Then, speaking of the stuffed animals, they noted, “They’re all pieces of each other. They’re all torn apart.”

Okoyomen told me that they themselves always try to stay consistent by focusing on a meditation practice that they practice every day. “I’m always trying to hack the predictive processing power of my brain and at least take a break,” Okoyomon said. “I try to live in the moment, and that takes a lot of effort.”