Marie-Jose Njoku-Obi

Marie-Jose is a contemporary visual artist based in Inglewood, California. Born in San Francisco in 1992, Marie has been exploring the multiplicity of the Black femme experience through painting, collage, and mixed media including stained glass, tile mosaic, and textile arts over the last decade. They employ surrealism as a tool for re-imagining the past and inspiring a previously indiscernible future and cite Rene Magritte, Dorothea Tanning and Kerry James Marshall, as well as their own Nigerian heritage as significant influences. Concepts for the work originate from an exploration of self combined with uncanny allegorical imagery. Defining their style as ‘Afro-Surrealistic’, Marie’s work reexamines the pre-conceived barriers of Black liberation.

Marie-Jose has participated in numerous group exhibitions, art markets, and festivals nationwide. Their paintings were featured in the Affordable Art Fair in New York and Aqua Art Miami in Miami Beach in 2022. They have also shown their work at Brea Gallery in Brea, CA, and the Museum of Science + Industry in Chicago. In 2022, Marie-Jose was an Artist in Residence participant in Albuquerque, NM, and Fukuoka, Japan. They were a Destination Crenshaw Round 5 Mini Mural Awardee in 2023 and had their art featured in Skew Magazine and World of Interiors. They made their international debut with a two-person exhibition with Studio Kura in Itoshima, Japan in July 2022.

Through the exploration of my multidisciplinary art practice, I continue to present visual imagery of insecurities, contentment, joy, & grief as a first generation American that references memory, placemaking, and the spectrum of the Black femme experience. My Nigerian heritage and historical research inspires me to create allegorical imagery to blur the boundaries between reality and transcendent symbolism in order to explore the intersection of diasporic identities & its ability to help re-imagine the future through an Afro-Surrealist lens. Often featuring Black figures as principal subjects in conjunction with cloudscapes & other natural elements as recurrent motifs, the resulting compositions are dynamic and fantasy-adjacent, summoning relatable memory and emotion in the collective consciousness of the diaspora.