Precious Okoyomon

Precious Okoyomon (b. 1993, London) is a Nigerian-American artist and poet who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Working across installation, sculpture, text, and performance, they build immersive environments from living and dying organic matter — soil, plants, water, blood, and live animals — in which ecological history, colonial violence, and Black queer experience are held within the conditions of growth and decay. Their practice treats the natural world not as backdrop but as an active participant in political and spiritual inquiry.

Central to Okoyomon's work is kudzu, a vine native to parts of China and Japan that was introduced to the American South after the Civil War to address soil erosion caused by cotton cultivation under slavery. The act of growing and incinerating kudzu becomes, in their work, a gesture of anti-colonial repair — one that links plant displacement to human displacement across centuries. Sugarcane, present in their grandmother's backyard in Nigeria and bound up in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, recurs as a second index of this entanglement. Alongside the plants, Okoyomon places large-scale anthropomorphic figures made from wire, lambswool, soil, and blood — featureless, named for words in Esan, an ethnic group in Nigeria — and incorporates live butterflies, running water, and the inadvertent presence of insects. Poetry runs throughout: Okoyomon draws on Édouard Glissant's theorization of relation and creolization, and their own published writing extends these inquiries in a distinct register.

Their solo exhibition Earthseed at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2020) was followed by a large-scale installation at Performance Space New York (2021). For the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), curated by Cecilia Alemani, they transformed an entire room of the Arsenale into a rampant living ecosystem in To See the Earth Before the End of the World; in 2024 they participated in the Nigerian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Further solo presentations include Kunsthaus Bregenz — where they were the youngest artist in the institution's history — the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Madrid, and the Aspen Art Museum.