Adjunct Professor Kambui Olujimi in Group Exhibition ‘Fantasy America’

By
Brittany Nguyen
March 18, 2021

The Andy Warhol Museum, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania presents group exhibition Fantasy America featuring five artists including alumnus and Adjunct Professor Kambui Olujimi '13.

The exhibition invites artists to revisit Warhol’s 1985 photography book America and contribute their own artistic practices. The original publication features photographs taken and collected by Warhol’s cross-country travels and in-person encounters over the previous decade. The book acts as an idiosyncratic love letter to America and reflects everything from travel, beauty, and fame to politics, technology, and the American Dream.

Curated by José Carlos Diaz, chief curator at The Warhol, the exhibition presents cross-disciplinary work by the full New York-based artists. The works are focused on and drawn to the “use of repetition, seriality, and image appropriation in their work. Each of these five artists produces work that blurs the boundaries between form and material, offering a complex picture of contemporary American life,” according to the museum’s website. “The works these artists have created are indelibly tied to our tumultuous present moment.”

Kambui Olujimi addresses nationhood and the colonization of bodies, land, time, and space, surfacing buried political pasts.

“Several years in planning, Fantasy America echoes the current moment of political upheaval and social reckoning. Against the backdrop of nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, the Black Lives Matter movement, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the presidential election, these works probe and challenge our perceptions of what America is and what it can become. Like Warhol, the artists in this exhibition hold a mirror to society, reflecting the country at a critical juncture in history.”

Olujimi’s (born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn) work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as "inevitabilities." This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance. 

Fantasy America is open to view at The Andy Warhol Museum from March 5 through August 30, 2021.

Installation shot of Fantasy America, featuring work by Kambui Olujimi
Installation shot of Fantasy America, featuring work by Kambui Olujimi