Curated by Raphaela Platow, Alice & Harris Weston Director and Chief Curator
With Maiza Hixson, Curatorial Assistant

Kaplan Hall Lobby

Presenting Sponsor: Dr. Stanley & Mickey Kaplan Foundation
Artist Sponsor: Robin & Mu Sinclaire

In early October 2007, Odili Donald Odita began a month-long transformation of Kaplan Hall, the lobby of the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art designed by acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid. Odita named the resulting site-specific wall painting FLOW.  “Coming into the space, I felt very energized by the design and the architecture,” Odita says.  “What I responded to in the space was the energy of being inside and outside at the same time.” 

Odita spent several days with his sketchbook, observing the space at different times of day, the shapes and angles of the architecture, the movement of pedestrians and passing cars, and the presence of neighboring buildings.  From his initial pencil sketches, Odita’s black and white designs were transferred to the walls using chalk lines to mark out the shapes. He then assigned colors leading to a final palette of 112, a unique color combination for each wall.  Realized with his full-time assistant Emily Erb and a crew of ten artists, FLOW gradually emerged through a laborious process of repeated taping and painting, each shard of color receiving multiple layers of standard acrylic house paint.

Odita’s angular bands create vivid abstractions that simultaneously suggest landscapes and African textiles, a reference to his birthplace in Nigeria.  What other associations may visitors make as they follow FLOW as it seemingly wraps its way around the lobby’s large walls or dazzles visitors descending to the lower lobby?  A young Kindergarten student, observing the installation in progress, said it reminded her of friendship, and when asked what she meant the student said “like a friendship bracelet.”  The woven strands of that childhood gift is an immediate, thoughtful comparison with the interweaving shapes that are a visual signature of Odili’s paintings, whether made on canvas or temporarily applied to gallery walls.

Free of any fixed point of perspective, FLOW offers visitors nearly endless angles from which to consider the work and its relationship to Hadid’s architecture.  FLOW encourages visitors to move through Kaplan Hall in search of dramatically different vistas: from the staircase leading to the 2nd floor, across the open lobby from the store, or between the facing walls with their bold starburst patterns.  Flow also propels vision outward, creating a heightened awareness of the intersecting movements of pedestrians and vehicles.  The work is equally compelling when viewed from outside with two of the best vantage points looking north from the skywalk over Walnut Street and looking west along Sixth Street.  Indeed, a portion of FLOW faces Walnut Street and is only visible from outside.

FLOW dissolves the distinction between inside and outside, asserting Kaplan Hall’s role as the community space that Hadid envisioned—the urban carpet that transforms the interior lobby into a public square—and suggesting the communal activity implied in Odita’s references to African textiles and wall painting.  Discussing his Nigerian ancestry, Odita states “[m]y paintings are often called internal geographies…In a sense they are my internalization of Africa and the landscape space that I was born in but haven’t lived in a large part of my life.”

On view for a full year, FLOW will seemingly change with the seasons, its colors responding to the oblique sunlight and gray of winter, while the subtler earth tones will resonate across the lengthening days of spring and summer.   Especially vibrant at night when reflections in the glass multiply its scale, FLOW extends across the street in beautiful counterpoint to artist Julian Stanczak’s monumental work of public art across Sixth Street.

Odita will discuss his work in a lecture at the CAC on Saturday, March 22, 2008 at 2 pm.

Odili Donald Odita was born in Enugu, Nigeria. He lives and works in Philadelphia. Odita earned a B.F.A. with Distinction in 1988 from Ohio State University, and an M.F.A. in 1990 from Bennington College, Vermont. Odita is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia.  He has exhibited all over the world, including at the Venice Biennale, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and in the traveling exhibition Black President: The Art & Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, which came to the CAC in 2005.