EventsThe New Social Environment#78

Odili Donald Odita with Tom McGlynn

Friday, July 3, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Painter Odili Donald Odita will discuss their work and creative life in the context of our new social reality with artist and critic, Tom McGlynn of the Brooklyn Rail. We will conclude with a poetry reading from Mary Reilly.

In this Talk

Odili Donald Odita

Artist Odili Donald Odita is an abstract painter whose work explores color both in the figurative historical context and in the sociopolitical sense. He is best known for his large-scale canvases with kaleidoscopic patterns and vibrant hues, which he uses to reflect the human condition. For Odita, color in itself has the possibility of mirroring the complexity of the world as much as it has the potential for being distinct.

https://jackshainman.com/artists/odili_donald_odita

Tom McGlynn

Tom McGlynn is an artist and writer based in the NYC area. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian among other national and international collections. He is currently an Editor at Large at The Brooklyn Rail, contributing articles and criticism since 2012. He also currently teaches at Parsons/The New School, NYC. In June 2024, he had his first one-person exhibition in Europe, at Settantotto Gallery in Gent, Belgium. He opened his fourth solo exhibition at Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC, in October 2025.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨