Odili Donald Odita Murals

As part of Nasher10, a celebration of the first decade and beyond, the Nasher Museum commissioned two large-scale murals by abstract painter Odili Donald Odita­. His wall painting inside the Nasher Museum’s Mary D.B.T. Semans Great Hall, entitled Shadow and Light (For Julian Francis Abele), is inspired by the African-American architect who designed most of Duke’s campus. Odita’s wall painting visually connects the Nasher Museum to downtown Durham, where he painted a second mural on the Foster Street wall of the Downtown Durham YMCA, 218 W. Morgan Street. That painting, entitled Time Bridge, was inspired by the city of Durham, which is, according to the artist, “a city that has an awareness of the complexity of its individual interests, and at the same time is open to allow those interests to thrive together as a community.”

Odita was born in 1966 in Enugu, Nigeria, and lives and works in Philadelphia. His abstract paintings explore ways to trigger memory and address the human condition through color, pattern and design.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.