Join SJMA Chief Curator Lauren Dickens in conversation with featured exhibiting artist Kambui Olujimi. They will share insights into the current exhibition Kambui Olujimi: North Star, which invites us to imagine new relationships to our bodies, the self, the planet, and the universe.

Creative Minds—SJMA’s premier artist talk series—provides audiences with an opportunity to meet artists and hear directly from them as they talk about their creative processes and practices.

KAMBUI OLUJIMI 

Born in 1976, Brooklyn-based Kambui Olujimi holds an MFA from Columbia University (2013) and a BFA from Parsons School of Design (2002); he also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Olujimi’s work was featured in the 2023 edition of the Sharjah Biennial, Thinking Historically in the Present. Select solo exhibitions include Walk With Me, Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ (2020); Zulu Time, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI (2017); and A Life in Pictures, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Inheritance, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2023); Love & Anarchy, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (2023); When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, South Africa (2022); Our whole, unruly selves, San José Museum of Art (2022); New Histories, New Futures, Cleveland Museum of Art, OH (2021); and Fantasy America, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2021). 

Olujimi is the recipient of many awards and residencies, including the Denniston Hill Artist Residency in Catskill, NY (2023); an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant (2022); a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (2021); the Black Rock residency in Dakar, Senegal (2019); the MacDowell Colony residency in Peterborough, NH (2018); and the Headlands Center for the Arts residency in San Francisco (2018), among many others. Olujimi’s work can be found in the collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Newark Museum of Art, NJ; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, among others.