Frayed, twisted, dyed and sewn: in Okore's hands the humblest fibre becomes a meditation on what blooms, ages and returns to the earth.
Nnenna Okore (b. 1975, Canberra, Australia) was raised in Nsukka, Nigeria, where the daily manual rhythms of life, sweeping, chopping, washing, weaving, harvesting, fabricating brooms, would become the deep grammar of her art. She graduated with a First Class degree in Painting from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1999, studying under the sculptor El Anatsui, whose mentorship, together with the lessons of Chijioke Onuora and Chike Aniakor and the example of Arte Povera, shaped her relationship to material. She earned her MA (2004) and MFA (2005) in Sculpture from the University of Iowa, and pursued practice-led doctoral research at Monash University, Australia, devoted to ecological art and bioplastics. She is Professor of Art at North Park University, Chicago, where she has chaired the Art Department and teaches sculpture and contemporary African art.
Okore reconfigures organic and discarded materials, burlap, cheesecloth, newspaper, rope, clay, wax and wire, into abstract, richly textured sculptures and installations of extraordinary range: diaphanous, monumental forms that tumble and cascade from gallery walls, resembling roots, veins, flora and topographies remembered from her Nigerian childhood. Each work is built through repetitive, labour-intensive processes, fraying, tearing, teasing, twisting, rolling, dyeing, waxing and sewing, that carry the memory of human labour and its mark on the material world. Her practice consistently engages the cultures of consumption and recycling, challenging environmental neglect and globalization, and meditating on ageing, fragility, decay and regeneration: the potency and ephemerality of life and its natural cycles. Her recent research extends this ecological commitment to biodegradable, food-based bioplastics, for which she received the Australian Creative Victoria Award.
Okore made her international debut in the inaugural exhibition "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary" at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2008), the year of her first London solo exhibition, "Ulukububa: Infinite Flow", at October Gallery, followed by "Metamorphoses" (2011). Her work has featured in "We Face Forward" at Manchester Art Gallery (2012), "Africa Africans" at the Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo (2015), the Dakar Biennale, "Osimili" at Jenkins Johnson Gallery (2017), the installation "Nkata" at the Krannert Art Museum, and "Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art" at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2019-2020), alongside El Anatsui, Gonçalo Mabunda, Zohra Opoku and Elias Sime. A Fulbright Scholar (2012), teaching for a year at the University of Lagos, she has held residencies and fellowships including Skowhegan, the UNESCO-Aschberg Fellowship, the Peabody Essex Museum and the Fondation Blachère. Her works have been exhibited in and acquired by institutions including the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Art, the Museu Afro Brasil and the Musée des Civilisations Noires, Dakar. She lives and works in Chicago.