Onome Daniella Olotu: Postcards from Ithaca
With Diva, the Cow, 1894 (2025) acrylic, plaster, paste on canvas, 10" x 8" (detail). image / provided
Exhibition Abstract
The Postcard Series reflects Onome Olotu's (M.F.A. '26) experiences as a non-immigrant at Cornell and in Ithaca amid shifting US politics. Using archival materials from the History Center in Ithaca and Cornell's Rare Manuscript Collections, she creates paintings layered with plaster, paste, and pigment. Olotu pushes her concept of layering further by including screen-printed plexiglass panels over textured surfaces to create shifts of light, shadow, and color as viewers move around the work.
These textured surfaces and layers are tropes of the ways history is recorded, obscured, and rewritten. The postmarks and stamps speak to the specificity of time and location, personalized to each individual postcard canvas. These "postcards" cut across moments in history, asking what it means to belong in a place that continually questions your presence.
Exhibitor Biography
Onome Daniella Olotu (b. 1993, Lagos, Nigeria) is an M.F.A. candidate in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell University whose multidisciplinary practice includes personal, family, and institutional archives that explore social history, identity, and memory. With a degree in painting from the University of Benin, Nigeria, she began her career as a curatorial assistant at the National Gallery of Art in Abuja, then became an arts instructor, and then a curatorial assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Lagos, before committing to full-time studio practice at Universal Studios of Art, Lagos, in 2018.
Working primarily in acrylics and printmaking, recently expanded by ceramics, her Postcard Series draws on archival photographs and documents to re-imagine the past and futures that reckon with erasure, while her Mask Series, inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois's double consciousness, confronts body dysmorphia and the politics of visibility through layers.
Olotu's work has been shown across Nigeria and North America, including Sankofa: African Routes, Canadian Roots at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia; Arts Council of Princeton, Princeton University; and recently, Cornell University.
She lives and works between New York City, Princeton, and Lagos.
