Toyin Ojih Odutola and Alva Noë
Current Artist in Residence Toyin Ojih Odutola is joined by philosopher Alva Noë, author of Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, in a conversation that unpacks the ways artistic practices can constitute and prod “reorganization” of thought and an individual’s conceptual relationship to the world and self. Ojih Odutola and Noë will focus especially on how these ideas might present in Ojih Odutola’s work. Guests are invited to attend a family-style dinner in the Mess Hall prior to the conversation; ticket price includes dinner.
About Toyin Ojih Odutola
Toyin Ojih Odutola creates drawings utilizing a variety of media to emphasize how an image is a striated terrain to tactically mine. Out of the surface language of a subject’s landscape, she traverses personal and political themes. Ojih Odutola has participated in solo and group exhibitions at several institutions, including the Contemporary Museum of Art St. Louis, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Seattle Museum of Art, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Menil Collection. She has held residencies at Tamarind Institute, Flying Horse Editions, and Yale University’s Summer Art Fellowship. Ojih Odutola was born in Ile-Ife, Nigeria in 1985, earned her BA from the University of Alabama in Hunstville, and her MFA from California College of the Arts. She currently lives and works in New York.
About Alva Noë
Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of the mind and human experience. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); and Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012). The central idea of these books is that consciousness is not something that happens inside us, or to us. It is something we do. His new book on art and human nature, Strange Tools, was released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 2, 2015. Noë received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995 and is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been philosopher-in-residence with the Forsythe Company in Frankfurt, Germany.