Visual Diversity Committee

Odili Donald Odita's mural, located in The Edge: The Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology and Collaboration, in Bostock Library, is a reproduction of the painting Chasm, part of the permanent collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Inside the Nasher Museum’s Great Hall, Odita’s wall painting Shadow and Light (For Julian Francis Abele), is inspired by the Black architect who designed most of Duke’s campus. Odita also painted a mural on the Foster Street wall of the Downtown Durham YMCA.

Odili Donald Odita, Reproduction of Chasm, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 120 inches (152.4 × 304.8 cm). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Gift of Kenneth W. Hubbard and Victoria Dauphinot. Reproduced by permission from the artist.

Odita was born in 1966 in Enugu, Nigeria, and lives and works in Philadelphia. His abstract paintings explore ways to trigger memory and address the human condition through color, pattern and design.

He is best known for his large-scale canvases with kaleidoscopic patterns and vibrant hues, which he uses to reflect the human condition. For Odita, color in itself has the possibility of mirroring the complexity of the world as much as it has the potential for being distinct. In his paintings, we see color interwoven and mixed, becoming an active agent in representing the essential power that light has in identifying the entirety of our world. He thinks of his colors as agents to express thoughts, ideas and transformational change. Much of his color selection is based on personal memories and created intuitively by hand-mixing, so that no two shades are ever repeated.

Raised in the U.S. Midwest, Odita’s work is also heavily inspired by a sense of dual identity, combining aspects of Western modernity with African culture. His practice speaks to a contrast of cultures and a desire to create something new from a set of distinct parts. In this sense, his paintings, like a stitched or quilted textile, are weavings from different spaces, times and various temperaments, which convey the complexity of culture, identity and being.

This installation in The Edge is a collaboration between the Duke University Libraries and the Nasher Museum and is a part of the Duke University Libraries’ Social Justice Roadmap initiative. Learn more at: bit.ly/dulroadmap