Art
Obi Agwam
Letters to Himself, Worlds for Us: Obi Agwam's Animated Surrealism
Kliem minn Teneshia Carr
On the afternoon we speak, Obi Agwam has just stepped off the Tube and into his London studio. He's a little dazed, constantly yawning, under-caffeinated, u, as it turns out, quietly celebrating his 26th birthday. "I just arrived in my studio space not even two minutes ago," he laughs. "I'm here for about a year." The move from Queens to the Royal Academy's prestigious fellowship program is a wild acceleration by any measure. But for Agwam, the speed of it all is less about luck and more about clarity.
Born in Lagos and raised in Southside Jamaica, Queens, Agwam grew up in a world that was both hyper-vivid and heavily policed. His parents kept him inside for safety, but the city taught him independence early. "I was on the train as early as like 10, 11 snin," jgħid hu. "You have to get those skills real early—being responsible, commuting, being safe and aware." Inside the apartment, the escape route was drawing. With limited access to the outside world, he fell in love with cartoons and animation. Alternate universes that felt brighter than the one right outside his window.
"I started drawing out of boredom," he remembers. "My physical surroundings weren't particularly stimulating, but the cartoons offered a level of joy that I wouldn't naturally get. So I instantly kind of used it as a coping mechanism." That "coping mechanism" quietly built a foundation: the kid who could draw in class, the teen doodling in notebooks, the young artist who still didn't see art as a viable life path.
That shift didn't come until community college, after the Universities he initially wanted said no. "They forced me to buy my first paints," he says of an introductory painting course. "Before that, I had always just been drawing… It was just something to pass the time. In that class, they forced me to create artwork in a physical, ,tangible way, on canvas. And ever since that year, I just started making stuff."
2019 was the beginning. 2020 was the pandemic—24-hour access to his own imagination. "We're locked inside. I don't got nothing else to do," he shrugs. "So we're gonna paint." He began posting the work online without a plan, just consistency. Within a year, he had an audience; by 2021, he was showing in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, u Londra. Fi 2024, he mounted his first solo show at Harkawik in Manhattan. Issa, the Royal Academy.
If the timeline sounds improbable, Agwam is the first to resist the myth of sudden discovery. "I do believe in destiny," jgħid hu, "but I also believe that people have their say on what's meant for them. People always say, 'If it's meant to be, it's meant to be,' but I think we have our own agency. I think with the right mindset, I could be an artist today, doctor tomorrow, astronaut the next day. With enough clarity and focus and intention, I think anything is possible."
That belief in agency shows up in the work itself—paintings populated by elastic, animated figures that seem to hover somewhere between cartoon, spirit, and memory. His imagery feels like a fever dream of Blackness: stretched limbs, rubbery expressions, worlds that vibrate with color and coded histories. "I lean into fantasy and surrealism and imagination," he explains. "Imagination serves a lot of different purposes. It serves a purpose in the act of resistance. It serves a purpose in self-soothing and just feeling better. If the world is going crazy and your physical world is crumbling or not what you want, the next best thing is to imagine the world outside of it."
For Agwam, that imagined world is deeply tied to the Black figure and the fraught visual lineage it carries. He dives into early twentieth-century American animation, Jim Crow-era caricatures, racist and grotesque, and collides them with contemporary cartoons and softer, stranger forms. "In the 1920s, 30s, and 40s and onwards, Black people were depicted a certain way, mostly playing on stereotypes," jgħid hu. "So I would take some of the visual elements from that, and also mix them with visual elements from modern cartoons and less offensive depictions of Black figures. I'm very, very, very concerned with bridging the gap between something that's illustrative and silly and fun, and something serious, high art."
His figures don't aim for realism. They aim for feeling. "It doesn't have to be hyper-realistic. It doesn't always have to be observational," he insists. "I always felt like I'm abstractly painting how I feel Black life feels, rather than what Black life looks like."
That distinction matters. In Agwam's universe, the Black figure is allowed to be elastic, weird, ecstatic, melancholy, and freed from the burden of legibility. The paintings function not just as images but as letters. He journals, meditates on specific memories, and uses those texts as prompts for each piece. Increasingly, the words themselves seep to the surface: stamped envelopes, handwritten lines, fragments of correspondence. "These portraits are like letters to myself and then letters to whoever's reading it," jgħid hu. "It's like memory, animation, imagination coming into this big melting pot."
There's also a quieter bravery in how he navigates risk. Agwam is acutely aware of the fine line between reclaiming caricature and reproducing harm. "It's a thin line between offensive and not offensive artwork," he acknowledges. "I think you find balance through trying and through failing. I'm not super happy with most of the artworks that I make, but I still put it out anyway. Because sometimes how I feel is irrelevant to how other people are going to feel about it."
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