Sculptor Woody De Othello paints a Miami museum red for a show that ‘almost hugs you’

California-based artist Woody De Othello was back in Miami a month or so ago in preparation for his first museum exhibition in his hometown, at Perez Art Museum Miami, and he was trying to reflect on ‘how I got from point A to B and to multiple points’, he tells Wallpaper*. He soon referred to his sketchbook, where he had scribbled his thoughts on the colour red’s connotations for renewal, transformation, and rebirth. This was the point when he decided to cover the walls of the exhibition, titled ‘Coming Forth by Day’, in a ruby-toned lime wash paint. Another influence was a trip to Senegal two summers ago, which had exposed him to many interiors painted in clay with rich textures. ‘Each day is a mini rebirth over and over again – we don’t realise how much we change in a lifetime,’ adds the artist, whose works span sculpture, ceramics, painting and drawing.

The exhibition delivers a cohesively ritualistic experience enveloped in De Othello’s scarlet hue choice on the textured walls, and tapping into multiple senses, with an olfactory component concocted with vetiver, a plant commonly found in Haiti. Nooks, plinths, and a pyramid layer the show with suggestions to look in, up, and around where his sculptures in glazed ceramic and carved wood await like seasoned storytellers. ‘Woody wanted to take the visitors elsewhere, outside his own space of the museum and transform it into a calm, tender place that feels almost like it hugs you,’ says the show’s curator Jennifer Inacio.

An untitled sculpture from 2025 shows a couple of huggers with gramophone-like heads. They tightly caress one another while standing on their knees inside two massive hands that cup them with a motherly compassion. The palpability of safety mingles with a mythical echo in the sculpture’s richly glazed surface, which stems from the artist’s multiple firing process in his kiln in search of the desired finish. ‘Don’t always do the work for the result,’ he says about a commitment to the intuitive process that he lets ‘dictate where things go with openness’.

Besides a creative journey often freed from an urge for a destination, a sense of homecoming resonates with De Othello’s return to Miami. He takes the moment to contemplate time and heritage as non-linear forces, with references to spiritual figures of Central Africa, his personal interest in metaphysics, Yoruba shines, and everyday objects, which generally appear in his sculptures as larger-than-life totems of memory and use.

A book about Kongo funerary objects, Four Moments of the Sun by Robert Farris and Joseph Cornet, was inspirational in the show’s embodiment of the animate. The sculptor, in fact, strives to grasp a non-hierarchical physicality in both living and mundane objects through his experiments in scale and material. ‘Both the living and everyday objects are animated by the same presence,’ he says. ‘There is the same emanating force that causes humans to exist as well as the inanimate world at the same time.’ De Othello sculpts familiar objects such as mirrors and even telephones out of his receptiveness to their fleeting impact. ‘Spirit takes from in all objects,’ according to the artist, who sees an abundance of potential in ‘unpacking what is between being a messenger and the receiver of that message’. The show’s mirror-like glazed ceramic works with wooden frames possess such double-sided souls between being grounded and ethereal.

In the artist’s offering of a journey to each visitor, the way up remains one of his routes. The show’s central bronze pyramid structure, which exhibits various small ceramic sculptures, stemmed from the intention to suggest ascension. ‘At first I thought about a staircase,’ explains De Othello. Eugene Fersen’s book Science of Being, where he talks about the four corners of the evolution – life, mind, truth and love – propelled him to settle on the pyramid form. The sculptures inside the pyramid show oozing bodies, mask-like faces, and less recognisable abstracted compositions, entangled with hands. The medley of the spirited body and the insentient summons another form of spirituality. ‘Everything radiates an essence and functionality,’ says De Othello, who continues to ask, ‘How do we become more aware of being in a physical body?’

'Woody De Othello: Coming Forth by Day' is at Perez Art Museum Miami until 28 June 2026

pamm.org