This visiting artist talk at the Johnson Museum of Art was the second in an ongoing series with the campus-wide Migrations Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell, with support from the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. The Migrations initiative studies global migration of all living things through an interdisciplinary, multispecies lens, with a special focus on themes of racism, dispossession, and migration.

Nigerian American poet, sculptor, and avant-garde chef Precious Okoyomon gave a participatory talk exploring themes of migration, dispossession, and redress. Okoyomon’s large-scale, immersive artworks are especially concerned with the entangled fate of humans, plants, and animal species as they move from place to place across the planet. Approaching artmaking like a poet, Okoyomon mines the metaphorical associations of all manner of found objects and raw materials—from kudzu vine to lambswool—to elicit new reflections upon our complex, interconnected histories. Okoyomon was born in England in 1993, raised in Nigeria and the United States, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Image of Okoyomon leading a reflective poetry workshop with students in the “Art of Horticulture” (PLHRT 2010) course courtesy of Craig Cramer, School of Integrative Plant Science, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.