Woody De Othello

Woody De Othello (born 1991, in Miami, Florida) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores spirit, domestic life, embodiment, and the emotional charge of everyday objects. Working across ceramics, bronze, wood, painting, and installation, De Othello examines the relationship between body, home, and psychic life through warped, anthropomorphic forms that transform clocks, telephones, fans, mirrors, and other familiar objects into uncanny vessels of presence and feeling.  De Othello earned a BFA from Florida Atlantic University in 2013 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. His work often engages ritual, ancestry, domestic space, and the spiritual resonance of objects, using clay, bronze, wood, and glaze to consider how ordinary things can hold memory, force, and emotional residue. Multiple sources connect his practice to the West and Central African concept of nkisi, positioning his sculptures as containers of energy and interior life rather than simply representations of household things.  His work has been exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Whitney Biennial, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the San Jose Museum of Art, and galleries including Karma and Jessica Silverman. His work is held in collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Woody De Othello lives and works in Oakland, California.