Photo credit: Ehsan Ahmed Mehedi

Ep.275 Boluwatife Oyediran (b. 1997, Ogbomoso, Nigeria) lives and works in Iowa City, USA. He holds an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was awarded the Presidential Fellowship. He is currently an MFA in fiction candidate and Sonny Mehta Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Oyediran’s multidisciplinary practice combines painting, creative writing, and photojournalism. His painting practice is committed to reimagining and reorienting Black identity within the canons of history, religion, and western art. His original, self-devised concept “inverted blackness” features portraits of Black migrants in the United States, depicted in luminous, photonegative paintings, visualizing their mutative and otherness identity. His practice centers on the Black diasporic experience in the United States and his vision is to elevate and insert this experience into the canon of art history.

Oyediran’s “inverted blackness” series was the subject of a solo exhibition at the AFIKARIS Gallery, Paris, in 2024, titled “Inverted Blackness” and accompanied by a publication of the same name. In 2025, following his MFA at RISD, Oyediran started Inverted Blackness, a Substack Photoblog that publishes photographs and oral accounts of the experiences of Black migrants in Rhode Island. In 2026, Oyediran’s work was acquired by Mattatuck Museum, and in the same year he becomes the first African writer awarded a Sonny Mehta Fellowship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he’s at work on a novel.

Oyediran’s work has been exhibited at the Kunsthalle Krems Museum, Austria; FLAG Art Foundation, USA; RISD Museum, USA; Fondation Blachère, France; Mattatuck Museum, USA; Gallery 1957, Ghana; UTA Artist Space, USA; Featherstone Center of the Arts, USA; Sotheby’s Tel Aviv, Israel; Twelve Gates, USA; and many more. His works can be found in the collections of Mattatuck Museum, David Adjaye, Fondation Blachère, Kutlesa, Serge Tiroche, Amir Shariat, and so many more. You can find him on Instagram @boluoyediran.

Artist https://www.boluoyediran.com/

Substack https://invertedblackness.substack.com/

Iowa Writers Workshop https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/news/2021/06/iowa-writers-workshop-announces-sonny-mehta-fellowships-creative-writing

AFIKARIS https://afikaris.com/exhibitions/44-inverted-blackness-boluwatife-oyediran/

Gallery1957 https://www.gallery1957.com/artists/85-boluwatife-oyediran/

Overblog https://cultureetplus.over-blog.com/2026/06/boluwatife-oyediran.html

Collatar. al https://www.collater.al/en/boluwatife-oyediran-inverted-blackness-chromatic-inversion-identity/

onart media https://www.onart.media/events-centered-on-contemporary-african-art/chromatic-deconstruction-and-identity-the-nuances-of-african-identity-in-america-through-the-art-of-boluwatife-oyediran/

OLYM https://www.olymcollection.art/artists/51-boluwatife-oyediran/biography/

r.public https://rpublc.com/author/boluwatife-oyediran

“Hold Me Here and There”
2025
oil and acrylic on canvas
213×152 cm / 84×56 in
(Copyright The Artist)

“The Transfiguration”
2023-24
oil, acrylic and oil stick on canvas
244×183 cm / 96×72 in
(Copyright The Artist)

Installation view:
“Inverted Blackness,” AFIKARIS Gallery, 2024
(positive and negative)

“My basement window (American Architecture I),” 2024,
Mixed media (acrylic and black 4.0 spray painted on vinyl siding structure
affixed with outdoor lamp, lamp wire connected to light source)
244×183 cm / 96×72 in
(Copyright The Artist)