Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Ceramics, sculpture, painting
Website: woodyothello.com
Woody De Othello was born in 1991 in Miami, Florida, of Haitian descent. He received a BFA from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and an MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2017. He has lived and worked in Oakland since. He is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco and Karma in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Renwick Gallery), and MAXXI in Rome. His large-scale public art commissions include works for San Francisco International Airport, the de Young Museum, and Cityline in Sunnyvale.
De Othello works primarily in hand-built clay and bronze, manipulating the forms of mundane domestic objects — clocks, fans, telephones, faucets, lamps, box fans, radiators — to transform them into warped, emotionally expressive sculptures. His approach is rooted in the West and Central African concept of nkisi, in which objects contain and release spiritual forces; for De Othello, each vessel is charged with psychic energy. His sculptures slump and sag under invisible pressure, twist and grasp with unexpected hands and fingers, appear exhausted, elated, or grieving. A rich tradition informs the work: the ceramic legacy of enslaved South Carolinian potters such as David Drake, Yoruba pottery, California Funk ceramics, and the Bay Area’s figurative sculpture lineage. His two-dimensional acrylic works extend the same world of surrealistic distortions into painting.
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