Jamilla Okubo is an interdisciplinary artist.
Jamilla Okubo is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intricacies of belonging to an American, Kenyan, and Trinidadian identity. Through combining figurative painting, pattern design, and fashion, Jamilla Okubo(b. Clinton, NC) uses the body as both a narrative instrument and primary tool of communication. Her layered experience as a North Carolina-born, Washington, D.C. bred, being a daughter of the Diaspora informs her practice, as does her background in Fashion and Design, which she began exploring at Parsons School of Design where she received her BFA. She is deliberate and articulate in her compositions referring to an emotional language, influenced by memories, lived experience, and the desire to stage the figures in meaningful moments to evoke a sense of nostalgia and intimate recollection of memory. The development of Okubo work has grown gradually out of an unparalleled devotion to color, the black figure, and space, and the creation of harmony.
Okubo has participated in various group exhibitions, most recently at The House of Fine Arts in London, The Southampton Arts Center, and Mehari Sequar Gallery. She has created art installations for Culture Corp x Hudson Yards (NY), and the Line Hotel. In addition, her work has been reproduced for publications and purchased for private collections. Notable publications of her work have appeared on the covers of An American Marriage, Tayari Jones (Oneworld UK Publishing House), Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neal Hurston, Harlem Renaissance Series (Penguin UK Publishing House), and Den Omättliga Vägen, Ben Okri (Modernista Group AB). She has collaborated with Christian Dior, Spotify, and Gorman.