Artist: Woody De Othello

For his first solo outdoor exhibition in New York City, Woody De Othello (b. 1991, Miami, Florida) presents Guardian Spirit, comprising four recent large-scale bronzes and three new totemic redwood sculptures. This exhibition highlights the artist’s ongoing exploration of nkisi—ritual objects from Western and Central Africa that embody spiritual presences and channel protective or healing forces. Othello approaches sculpture making through a tender focus on the world around us, highlighting the emotional force behind the objects and rituals that shape our daily lives.

Each work showcases Othello’s sculptural language, whereby everyday objects become extensions of intimate actions. In thought in mind, an enlarged phone and comb suggest these quotidian objects’ outsized importance: how something as fleeting as a phone call can change the course of our lives. Communication is a recurring theme of the exhibition. Capacity, inner knowing, and Involution feature trumpet horn-shaped appendages merging with ears and hands to suggest connections between sensation and emotion, mirroring nkisi, which unify the physical and spiritual realms. Othello hand carved three totems with symbolic reliefs: outstretched hands for compassion, kneeling figures for reverence, ears for listening and birds for freedom. Each gesture blends into the next, evoking the shifting ways we experience emotion, memory, and consciousness.

Woody De Othello: Guardian Spirit is curated by Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.

Woody De Othello (b. 1991, Miami) works primarily in clay and bronze, manipulating mundane objects such as clocks, calendars, phones, and box fans to transform them into warped, uncanny repositories of psychic significance. This approach builds on the West and Central African concept of nkisi, in which objects contain and release spiritual forces; for Othello, each work is a vessel, even when it is physically sealed. His two-dimensional works also present surrealistic distortions of scale and temporality, invoking the familiar but confounding legibility. He lives in Oakland, California.

Recent institutional solo exhibitions include coming forth by day, currently on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin (2021–22) and San José Museum of Art, California (2019). His work was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept. Othello’s work is represented in the collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Baltimore Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Dallas Museum of Art; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Rennie Museum, Vancouver; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San José Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.