Kambui Olujimi: North Star

From November 1, 2024 through June 1, 2025, the San José Museum of Art (SJMA) will present Kambui Olujimi: North Star, an immersive exhibition that invites us to imagine a different way of being in the universe. North Star is Olujimi’s first solo museum exhibition on the West Coast and will feature large-scale watercolor and ink paintings, a site-specific mural, a film, and a new sculpture and video installation that together comprise the artist’s most recent multidisciplinary project. Taking the deliberate absence of Black joy in Western art histories and visual culture as a point of departure, North Star explores the liberatory possibilities of weightlessness.

Approaching white supremacy as a type of structural force like gravity, Olujimi asks: What does the Black body, freed from the gravity of white supremacy, look like? What is the Black body in zero gravity?

Olujimi’s work is deeply joyful, said SJMA’s Chief Curator, Lauren Schell Dickens. With his North Star installation, he’s offering us a way to navigate away from the entrenched politics of representation, to imagine possibilities of boundlessness, within bodies, between bodies, and with the universe.

A highlight of the exhibition is North of Never, a film about a parabolic flight the artist chartered for a group of singers, writers, choreographers, and other artists from the African diaspora to experience weightlessness. Organized into chapters exploring ideas sparked by the group’s experience, footage of the flight is spliced with clips drawn from the artist’s video archive and found footage—including clips of South African car spinning showcases, Maasai jumping dance performances, and a recording of French figure skater Surya Bonaly’s 1998 Olympics performance. The soundtrack layers audio from post-flight interviews with a score by jazz pianist Chris Pattishall. The film was commissioned by the Lincoln Center in New York, which hosted the premiere of the film and a two-day symposium that explored the film’s themes of play, self-discovery, and the unknown with leading artists, scientists, writers, musicians, and dancers.

The centerpiece of North Star consists of Olujimi’s large-scale watercolor and ink paintings enveloped by a site-specific wall mural, which will transform the main gallery into an immersive cosmic space. During a trip to the NASA Ames Research Center, Olujimi toured and met with scientists working in the Arc Jet Complex and the Space Science and Astrobiology Division. Olujimi’s conversations with NASA scientists inspired a new sculpture and video installation, which will animate the figures from Olujimi’s paintings and provide an architecture of transfer and transformation to further imagine other possibilities of life here and elsewhere.

sjmusart.org