It all started by accident. One night in his studio at the Rhode Island School of Design, working on Photoshop, artist Boluwatife Oyediran accidentally inverts a photograph of some African boys he was editing. Their bodies shift from black to cerulean blue, from positive to negative. That is the moment he knows what he wants to do.
From that intuition grows the concept that drives all of his research: inverted blackness. Oyediran is a multidisciplinary artist from Nigeria — painter, writer, and photographer — who has developed a series of portraits of Black migrants in the United States rendered in photographic negative, with luminous, otherworldly bodies that seem to belong somewhere else. It is not merely an aesthetic choice. It is a visualisation of something Oyediran knows from the inside: the identity mutation of those who live between two cultures without fully belonging to either.
“I kept oscillating between my original African identity and the American identity I was taking on, much like the inverted photograph switching between positive and negative. And at the same time, I sensed that I could no longer revert to being fully African, nor could I become fully American,” he says in an interview with The Spotted Zebra.
The people in his paintings are not anonymous figures: they are friends, colleagues, and acquaintances met at RISD, Brown University, and through his volunteer work in African communities in Rhode Island. Each portrait is part of a collective archive that Oyediran has extended to a Substack photoblog, Inverted Blackness, where he publishes photographs and oral accounts of the experiences of Black migrants.
Writing is an integral part of his practice. In Nigeria he studied literature before turning to painting full time. At RISD he included a short story in his thesis about a Nigerian immigrant’s arrival in America. Today he is a Sonny Mehta Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he is working on a novel. When writing stalls, he turns to painting. When painting runs dry, he returns to writing.
His work does not aim to speak of Blackness as a monolithic category, but of one specific fraction of it: Black migrants in the United States, people who have crossed the ocean, who navigate the reality of visa expiration dates, who have had to assimilate a culture without losing their own. “The United States has benefited from the human capital of these people,” he tells The Spotted Zebra. “My art can illuminate their stories.”
