American literature shaped Nigerian painter Boluwatife Oyediran’s aesthetic, which is odd considering Oyediran didn’t intend on being a professional painter.

Yes, he studied fine and applied arts in secondary school but in university he majored in literature. He wanted to write. But in those classes Oyediran encountered Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston and other American writers who explore the beauty and brutality of the Black experience in America, and beyond.

Oyediran’s mind was blown. His history lessons in Nigeria rarely discussed the realities of slavery, segregation, and hate in America, and of the broader slave trade. “No one really ever taught me that at school. It was not in my history curriculum. The little I’d heard about that was like a myth,” the artist said in a video call. Growing up, he didn’t think much about the Black experience in America. Nigeria was colonized by the British. That was his reference point.

“I never cared until I studied American literature. That was when I realized there is a connection between we Africans on the continent and black people in America.” 

Rather than being repulsed by America’s ugly past, Oyediran ran toward it – he absorbed all he could about the history of slavery in the Western world, especially the States. 

Then came 2020. As the pandemic swept the globe, Oyediran found himself painting again. This time, though, he had a vision. He pulled from all he’d learned about the Black diaspora to depict Black figures as historical monarchs and leaders, like Napoleon and Queen Elizabeth, standing in fields of cotton. The series, an interrogation of history, fashion, and Black people’s central role in both, was called Point of Correction. 

Oyediran’s works garnered him a residency and shows in Accra, Ghana, and Paris, France, epicenter of a fashion history that relied on cotton picked by enslaved and oppressed peoples. One of the pieces from this era, 2021’s A Father’s Love, was recently acquired by the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT.

As his work gained attention and sales, Oyediran realized the next logical step in his career was graduate school, eventually accepting a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design with the intention of pioneering a new narrative –something that charted an entirely fresh path in America. 

But what, and how?

Looking for inspiration, Oyediran experimented with Photoshop to edit pictures he’d taken in Ghana. Then, like Benjamin Franklin flying his kite in a lightning storm, a happy accident changed everything: Oyediran hit the wrong command in Photoshop and inverted a photograph of Black teens into a negative: white became black and black became – not white. It was something else: a gorgeous, otherworldly, luminous blue.

Two simultaneous ideas emerged for Oyediran. The first: humans’ inner light. “I was interested in the bioluminescence of humans,” he said. “Human bodies emit light that is 1,000 times less than what our eyes could perceive.” It’s ever-present yet invisible.

But an additional layer emerged: a visual parallel to the immigrant experience he himself was living. “When you come into the States as an African, you come as a fully fleshed African person, with all your experiences and all your values,” he said. “Over time you find yourself changing in so many ways… The way you dress, the way you talk, the way you relate to people. Even maybe your values begin to change, your world view.”

To capture that light-as-experience in other African immigrants, Oyediran photographed other RISD and Brown University students and then congregants at a local Nigerian church.

“I think what I’m doing is really important, documenting these people on Sundays, which is the best day of the week,” he said. “I say ‘it’s the best day of the week’ because when we gather that way on Sundays, we worship, we do everything we do after service, people eat, people, the justice community, and then [people] go to their individual jobs during the week, looking forward to seeing people again on Sunday.”

After taking the photos, inverts them in Photoshop, and paints the results in oil and acrylic, turning out magnetic, sublime images of people’s inner glow living life.

Oyediran’s subjects are African immigrants, and speak specifically to that experience, but viewing them, and knowing about the light we all emit, his images are also a reminder of that essential truth: we all hold the immigrant experience within. Immigrants’ cultures and traditions blend with those that came before, informing the present and future of people born here and people who are just joining us.

“You see that life can be lived differently and see that people can exist differently, and it changes the way you perceive people, “Oyediran notes of his own experience moving here. “This phobia that had or this fear of this kind of person, all of those change. I like that about the United States.” 

For his next work, Oyediran is returning to his literary roots at the prestigious Iowa Writing Program, where undoubtedly he’ll forge something that’s uniquely Oyediran yet universal to us all. Looking even further forward, he hopes to open a museum celebrating the many ways Black immigrants have positively impacted the U.S. and us.