Born in London in 1993 and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Precious Okoyomon is a Nigerian artist, poet, and chef whose multidisciplinary practice blurs the boundaries between art, nature, and identity. Living and working in New York City, Okoyomon’s creations — spanning sculpture, installation, performance, and poetry — explore the entanglements of race, queerness, divinity, ecology, and colonial memory.
A graduate of Shimer College, Chicago, where they studied pataphysics (the physics of imagination), Okoyomon’s early works began in culinary art. While working at the Michelin-starred Alinea, they developed performance dinners that fused food, ritual, and philosophy — a glimpse of the conceptual intensity that would later define their artistic career.
Okoyomon’s art is both lyrical and political, addressing how humans and the natural world are racialized, classified, and made to coexist. Their acclaimed installations — from A Drop of Sun Under the Earth (LUMA Westbau, Zurich) to Earthseed (MMK, Frankfurt) — merge living materials like vines, wool, and soil with themes of regeneration, memory, and spiritual mutation.
They’ve exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and Aspen Art Museum, among others. In 2021, Okoyomon received both the Frieze Artist Award and the Chanel Next Art Prize, cementing their place among the world’s most vital contemporary artists.
Their literary works — Ajebota (2016) and But Did U Die? (2024) — mirror their visual art: experimental, raw, and metaphysical, probing the Black queer experience through digital-age poetics and ancestral philosophy.
Okoyomon’s ongoing culinary collective, Spiral Theory Test Kitchen, combines queer theory, sensory dining, and social activism, further reflecting their holistic approach to art as lived experience.
Influenced by figures like Eileen Myles, Arthur Jafa, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Okoyomon’s work imagines liberation not as escape, but as blooming — the wild act of existing freely, like the “beautiful weeds” they celebrate: resistant, radiant, and unkillable.
