In 2018, a 52-foot-high concrete obelisk standing in a town square in Kassel, Germany, was quietly dismantled and removed by right-wing anti-immigration activists. The piece called “Monument to Strangers and Refugees” bears the words, “I was a stranger and you took me in.”
Nigerian-born artist Olu Oguibe was commissioned to create the installation as part of an international art event called “documenta 14.” In 2019, the monument was returned to the city and now stands in a different location.
Oguibe is a multimedia artist and writer who lives and works in Vernon, Connecticut. His work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and outdoor spaces around the world. He was a professor of painting at the University of Connecticut until 2014, when he resigned to devote himself full time to making art. Oguibe was recently named a fellow by United States Artists, which provides unrestricted cash awards to people working creatively in a range of artistic disciplines.
Oguibe spoke recently with Connecticut Public Radio’s Diane Orson. He said that his “Monument to Strangers and Refugees” had been designed with its original location in mind.
Oguibe: We looked at a number of different spaces, actually. The broad idea for the project was the same, but the forms that I had in mind for the different locations were actually quite different. So if we had ended up creating the work for the train station, it would have used the same text that I used eventually, but the form itself would have been very, radically different. We wouldn’t have had an obelisk.
But I have to be honest with you in saying that, as someone who for many years has done public pieces in different countries and had also taught graduate seminars on making public art and written about public art, I knew that when you go into a space like that you are going into a political space. It’s not just like you’re making work for your studio or for your commercial gallery. The space belongs to the people. It doesn’t belong to the artist. And it’s always important that they have a say.
What we did not anticipate was the extent and virulence of the pushback. So we practically walked into it. We stepped into it. And the politicians on the far right took advantage and wanted to weaponize that for political gain.
Orson: Could I probe you a little more on the idea of art as a vehicle to respond to a changing political climate? In what way do you see art as moving conversations to a better place?
Oguibe: Well, I have my own philosophy about what art can or should do. And quite frankly, I begin from the premise that art has no duty to do anything at all except be art. I try to leave space for people to appreciate art for all the different things it can do, as long as it doesn’t impinge on people’s rights and safety.
Art certainly has the capability — and not just art — I would say that everything has the capability, quite frankly … every vocation or preoccupation has the capability of moving social and political conversations in one direction or another. Even cooking. Being a chef can move conversations toward communal harmony. Or it can move conversations in the opposite direction to that. So art is capable of all this.
Orson: What brought you to Connecticut, and why do you stay?
Oguibe: Well, I came to Connecticut in 2003 to teach at University of Connecticut at Storrs. And I found community in Connecticut.
Lately, though, and this is an important point to make, lately I’ve had reason to feel like I might not be able to stay in Connecticut for the very simple reason that there’s very little support for individual artists and their practices.
If I were in a position to, oh, I don’t know, direct the manner in which the state supports its artists, I would change it very radically toward looking at artists as workers who pay tax, and therefore need to have sustained practices where they can make a living as well as contribute to their communities and to the economy of the state.
