The artist trio of Odinga, Kai Lumumba Barrow, and Malcolm Goff has significant threads stitching their work into a cohesive collection. Using oil and acrylic paints, wood and fabric along with everyday tools such as chisels, sewing machines, can openers, and ice picks, their first group exhibition entitled, Kwîza is an inquiry of migration and alienation. Collectively, the artists achieve a volatility that inundates the viewer with blood-rich images and textures. Plunging into the reservoir of marginality that binds oppressed people, these works are unapologetically political and courageously personal.

Odinga, Barrow, and Goff have lived in Chicago at different generations and currently reside in Durham, North Carolina where they met and live within a few miles of each other. With Kwîza (Congolese for “to come”), the threesome stretch ideas of migration to include spiritual and emotional exodus using the ‘dirty south’ as a backdrop for their own reflection on ideas of transience and relocation. As individual artists, they embrace elastic ideas of ‘nomadism” that lends to their collective work an insight on how a digitized, global society contradicts traditional notions of place allowing new opportunities to re-imagine ourselves as prodigal children.