Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Recommendations
Artist Toyin Ojih Odutola is sharing her personal picks with you: music, books, and movies that inspired her while she created A Countervailing Theory in 2019, opening at the Hirshhorn on Friday. The exhibition of 40 large-scale drawings tells a story conceived by the artist about a prehistoric civilization in which female warriors ruled over a class of male laborers. Get to know these artworks on a deeper level and uncover influences ranging from Octavia E. Butler’s books to the music of Solange, drawing from science fiction tropes.
Here’s what inspired the artist during a highly creative time in her life.
MUSIC
In the process of creating ACT, it felt like a return to some truer, ancestral self; something I’d either denied, or suppressed, or forgotten. The music in this playlist encapsulates how I navigated through a process of remembering and in that found a vision for a generative future. – TOO, 2021
GRAPHIC NOVELS
- Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki
- Low (series), by Rick Remender & Greg Tocchini
- Hellboy in Hell: The Death Card, by Mike Mignola
- The Metabarons or The Saga of The Meta-Barons (series), by Alejandro Jodorowsky & Juan Giménez
- The Incal: What Is Above (series, Vol. 4), by Alexandro Jodorowsky & Moebius
FILMS
- Robot Carnival (anime anthology, 1985), specifically the 11min short film, “Cloud”
- AniMatrix anthology (2003)
- Arrival
- Minority Report
- The Fountain
- Blade Runner 2049
- Ghost in the Shell, 1995
- I Am Not An Easy Man
- Gattaca
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER REQUIRED READING
- Patternmaster
- Mind of My Mind
- Wild Seed
- Dawn
- Bloodchild
- Adulthood Rites
