Precious Okoyomon’s Whitney Biennial Installation Is on View After a Delay, and It’s a True Shocker

Earlier this month, the Whitney Biennial went on view to the usual amount of fanfare—but one work was notably missing from the show. That work, a room-filling installation by Precious Okoyomon featuring stuffed animals and racist dolls suspended from the ceiling by nooses, was initially meant to appear in the lobby. But shortly before the exhibition opened to the press, the artist and the show’s curators pulled the plug on that plan.

The issue, Okoyomon told ARTnews this week, was not the piece’s disturbing subject matter but a more practical problem: they felt they needed more space to realize such an ambitious project. “It didn’t work,” they said of the initial lobby idea. The dolls and animals “needed to be lower. You have to engage with them in a place where you can look at them and be with them.”

We met on the Whitney Museum’s the eighth floor, where their installation, titled Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid (2026), finally went on view Wednesday. Cupping their poodle, Gravity, they seemed proud of the fully realized version, and they had every right to be—the installation is one of the great pieces of this Whitney Biennial.

An expanded and readapted version of a work previously shown in 2023 at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, a vaunted contemporary art museum in Austria, Okoyomon’s piece features around 50 stuffed animals and dolls that dangle from the floor’s rafters. Sunlight pours in from a skylight that is not regularly exposed to the public, underscoring the sense that this installation is oddly beautiful, despite an uncomfortable mix of cutesiness and queasiness that has become Okoyomon’s signature and made them one of the most exciting sculptors working today.

Torn-open plushies, uncontrollable kudzu, and piles of earthen matter sculpted to form deities have all appeared in Okoyomon’s work, which has been shown in venues ranging from the Venice Biennale to the Palais de Tokyo. According to Okoyomon, binding much of their work is an inquiry into violence and healing. “So much of my stuff comes from endlessly processing,” Okoyomon said. “Adam Phillips says we never get over the masochism of our childhood. And it’s true.”

Some of those stuffed animals in the Whitney work were Okoyomon’s childhood toys, while others were thrifted in the Midwest, the region where the artist was raised. The dolls, meanwhile, came from an antiques dealer in Astoria whose shop contains “insane, cursed” items, as Okoyomon put it. Affixed with taxidermy feathers harvested from dead pets by one of Okomoyon’s friends, all these objects together form a haunting installation about the little bursts of carnage that happen everywhere all the time. In a nod to all that bloodshed, Okoyomon has spliced up these stuffed animals and dolls and recombined their parts to form new beings.

Okoyomon, who has a habit of quoting from philosophers they admire, said, “These sculptures are in a state of arrested transcendence. What does it mean to be an angel in the Miltonian sense? You can’t kill an angel and the continuous gravity that’s held within it! I’m thinking through if my work is ever separate from the self and the everyday relational violence [of] Blackness.”

Drew Sawyer, who curated the Whitney Biennial with Marcela Guerrero, told ARTnews that Okoyomon produces “beautiful installations that also have these very sinister, dark narratives.” By way of example, he pointed out that the plush animals in the Whitney work show signs of use. “They clearly have been loved,” he said, “so there’s very tender part of it. But they’ve been discarded, and these birds are dead. So, there is grief and violence, and they’re hung from nooses, which have various connotations,” such as lynchings and suicide.

Okoyomon’s work is often characterized by a slippery, menacing quality that is evident both in the Whitney piece and in When the Lambs Rise Up Against the Bird of Prey (2024), a work currently on view at the recently reopened New Museum downtown. The New Museum work features a Black figure outfitted with a sheer white dress and animal’s ears. (The dress looks a bit like the lacy one Okoyomon wore when I met them.) This figure stares directly at its viewer before making jerky movements—it’s an animatronic, but you don’t necessarily know that going in. The piece is situated in a recess whose walls are lined with a tufted material. “It’s pink fiberglass insulation,” Okoyomon said, laughing. “If you get close and breathe it in, it will kill you.”

Did they want to shock with a work like this one? I posed the question to Okoyomon, who said, “It’s not provoking. I call it a real, slow rearrangement of everyday desire.”

A gardener and a poet as well as an artist, Okoyomon has often focused on the land around them. Born in 1993 in London, they grew up searching for what they described as “continuous space” as their family relocated many times over, moving between the UK, Nigeria, and the US. “No matter where we went, there was always semi-nature,” they said. “We lived in Texas, and then Ohio, where there were woods. Sometimes, I don’t understand the people around me. Everything might change all the time.” In an attempt to find some fixity, they grew to love the earth as a kid, writing poems that they buried in the ground.

Okoyomon went on to study philosophy, graduating from Shimer College in Naperville, Illinois, in 2014, but they found that they “have a different relationship to language” than most who work in that field. They do not view their art as being entirely separate from the poetry they continue to write. “It’s a relational way of seeing the world,” they said of their practice. “It’s just witnessing.”

During the late 2010s, as their artistic career began to take off, their work grew up bigger, reaching a new apex in 2020 with a show at the MMK museum in Frankfurt, Germany. Organized by Susanne Pfeffer, one of today’s most lauded curators, and staged before Okoyomon had turned 30, the show featured a garden installation dominated by Resistance is an atmospheric condition (2020), a sprawl of kudzu, using an invasive species lured from Japan to the US as a metaphor for Blackness. Once the plant started growing, it was tough to stop it. By the show’s end, it had nearly overtaken some of the sculptures set within it. The work ended up ranking on ARTnews’s list of the best works of the 21st century so far, making Okoyomon one of the youngest artists represented in the survey.

“I saw the MMK show, and I was completely blown away,” said Cecilia Alemani, a curator who would go on to include Okoyomon in her 2022 Venice Biennale. Positioned at the end of the Arsenale, one of the Biennale’s two main venues, was an unforgettable installation by Okoyomon, who filled a space formerly used to hold weaponry with dirt, plants, and live butterflies. “It was challenging, because growing a garden in March in Venice in a 15th-century building is not exactly an easy task. But we worked hard to grow plants in a greenhouse, and they made these sculptures out of wool,” Alemani recalled, noting that the kudzu there also threatened to consume the site where it was set.

Okoyomon’s work, Alemani continued, “is not about asking: which is stronger, nature or man, life or death? It’s about hybridity. They accept these in-between spaces.”

The transcendence of Okoyomon’s art can often mask the ugliness that bubbles just beneath its surface. Speaking of their Whitney work, Okoyomon noted that the stuffed animals appear to float, a choice they compared to the effect of racism. “White supremacy is an abduction of everyday gravity—it stops the sky and structure,” they said. Then, speaking of the stuffed animals, they noted, “They’re all pieces of each other. They’re all disassembled.”

Okoyomon told me that they themselves are always trying to keep it together by focusing on a meditation practice that they practice every day. “I’m always trying to hack the predictive processing of my brain, to at least rest a little bit,” Okoyomon said. “I’m trying to be in the present time, and that takes a lot.”