Precious Okoyomon: Queer Ecology, Race, and the Racialized Natural World
Precious Okoyomon: Queer Ecology, Race, and the Racialized Natural World
Precious Okoyomon (born 1993, London) is a Nigerian-American artist, poet, and chef based in New York City. Their practice moves across installation, sculpture, performance, and writing. At its core, it examines how nature gets racialized. It also tests the links between Christianity, intimacy, and time.
Early life and education
Okoyomon moved from London to Cincinnati at age eleven. Later, they attended Shimer College in Chicago. There, they studied pataphysics—often described as the “physics of the imagination.”
At the same time, they worked at Alinea, a three-Michelin-star restaurant. That experience mattered. It sharpened their sense of materials, staging, and atmosphere. Even their thesis took the form of experimental dinners. The meals pushed comfort and expectation on purpose.
Key themes: identity, nature, Christianity, and intimacy
Okoyomon’s work often sits at the intersection of race, queerness, and the natural world. However, it doesn’t treat “nature” as neutral. Instead, it asks who gets framed as natural, invasive, pure, or disposable. That framing becomes political.
Their installations frequently mix beauty with threat. As a result, viewers face a double message: care and harm, tenderness and violence, growth and decay.
Works and projects
Poetry and language: Ajebota (2016)
Ajebota, their first poetry book, explores identity as a Black queer immigrant. It also uses internet shorthand and compressed language. In doing so, it reflects how writing changes when the screen becomes the primary space of reading.
Material politics: I Need Help (2018)
In collaboration with Hannah Black, Okoyomon presented dolls made from raw wool alongside shredded books. The work embraces mess, collapse, and transformation. It treats decomposition as an aesthetic and political fact, not a metaphor.
Institutional turning point: A Drop of Sun Under the Earth (2019)
This solo exhibition at LUMA Westbau (Zurich) brought together tree forms, seeds, and an atmosphere of suspended violence. The installation circulated cotton and cottonwood seeds through the space like snowfall. It also introduced their first video work, which uses tragic comedy to probe racialized ideas of evil.
Earthseed (2020): mutation, flux, and living systems
Curated by Susanne Pfeffer at MMK Frankfurt, Earthseed was their largest project to date. It included the invasive vine kudzu as a charged metaphor. It also featured large-scale raw wool sculptures. The exhibition drew on Octavia E. Butler’s fictional religion from Parable of the Sower. In short, it proposed a theology of mutation and motion.
Recognition and impact
Okoyomon’s work has entered major conversations around contemporary art, ecology, and identity. In addition, pieces have been included in institutional and private collections, in
