In Odera Igbokwe’s The Ori, The Connector, a blue-toned figure in a high red collar raises one hand before their chest. Circular forms hang in the painted blue field above the figure’s head. The pose is still, yet the colour around it looks restless. The 2019 painting belongs to a body of work called Dance of the Summoner. Its title joins an idea of inner orientation to an act of relation. How might a person of the African diaspora make a home among histories that have been separated? Igbokwe gives that question a body, a gesture and a space whose depth is less certain than its presence.
Igbokwe is an illustrator and painter of Nigerian ancestry based in Vancouver, with an earlier life in Brooklyn. They use they/them pronouns. Their conversation with Yani Kong for Simon Fraser University’s Comparative Media Arts Journal places fantasy and Afrofuturism within a practice of personal mythology. These are Igbokwe’s own terms. They describe Dance of the Summoner as a reclamation and reworking of Nigerian and diasporic deities, orishas and sacred traditions. The aim is not simply to recover something old. It is to make room for the artist and the viewer to imagine a fuller range of selves.
That ambition gives the work its tension. A painting may refer to a sacred tradition, but its audience encounters a new object made by an artist who also grew up with comics, animation and games. Igbokwe refuses the idea that those visual languages must live in separate worlds. Their figures inhabit the meeting point of mythology, illustration, imaginative realism and queer life. The result is neither a museum reconstruction of ritual nor a fantasy that has left history behind. It is a contemporary image that recognizes how inherited stories are continually interpreted by living people.
What a summoner brings forward
The word summoner suggests agency. Someone calls, and something answers. In Igbokwe’s series, the call comes from a person working through distance from Nigerian spiritual and cultural inheritances. Their artist statement, published with the 2019 SFU interview, describes the fractures of diaspora and the desire to build a home without pretending those fractures can simply disappear. The paintings are one way of asking what can be carried across that distance.
The Ori, The Connector is a small work, twelve by sixteen inches. That scale matters beside the breadth of its title. In the reproduction published with the SFU interview, the figure’s red garment opens at the middle to reveal the abdomen, while one hand rises into a narrow vertical gesture. Rounded forms above and angled, paler marks behind the figure prevent the blue field from settling into a conventional room or landscape. The body is sharply present; the place around it is still being made. A viewer can approach the painted person closely without being given a single literal account of the surrounding world.
The SAD Magazine interview reproduces The Ori, The Connector and Mami Wata as examples from the series. These titles signal different routes into the work. One identifies an inner and relational force; the other names a water-associated figure whose appearances vary across African and diasporic traditions. Igbokwe does not present the paintings as definitive illustrations of a fixed religious textbook. Their own description emphasizes reclamation and alchemy, words that allow for transformation. The sacred referent is treated as living material for reflection, not as a costume for an exotic scene.
There is a reason Igbokwe speaks of a dance rather than an archive of figures. Dance involves bodies moving through time and responding to other bodies. Igbokwe studied West African dance and movement theatre while at Brown University, alongside their training in illustration at Rhode Island School of Design. The connection between movement and image appears in how they describe their practice: color, motion and queer magic become ways to make an ancient narrative feel active in a present body. The work does not ask viewers to stand outside tradition and admire it. It asks how a person might move with it now.
Their attention to sacred imagery has another dimension. For people whose relationship to an ancestral place has been mediated by migration, family story and colonial histories, access to a tradition may be incomplete. Igbokwe’s paintings do not hide that incompleteness. Their stated question about sewing the fractures of diaspora is powerful because sewing leaves a seam. The joining is real, while the prior separation remains part of the object’s form. In that sense Dance of the Summoner is a series about making relation, not claiming an effortless return.
More than a visible Black figure
Igbokwe has spoken directly about the limits of representation as an artistic goal. In the SFU interview, they argue that Black figures should be able to inhabit the ordinary, the fierce, the joyful and the otherworldly. The question is what an artist can make after the demand for visibility has been answered in a particular image. A figure appearing in a fantasy painting may correct an absence, but Igbokwe wants the freedom to do more than correct. They want to experiment with the character’s world and emotional range.
They describe looking at their own portfolio around 2016 and noticing that its emotional palette felt narrower than their actual personality. The work showed resilience and defiance, while play and joy had less space. That recognition became an artistic change. It did not mean ignoring the pressures that made resilience necessary. It meant refusing to let those pressures determine the only moods a Black queer figure could occupy on a painted surface. The joy in Igbokwe’s later work is therefore neither a decorative uplift nor a denial of harm. It is part of a more accurate account of life.
The distinction comes into focus in Robyn Hood & The Tale of Reparations, a 2018 oil painting on board reproduced by the SFU journal. A seated figure in blue-green clothing looks directly toward the viewer. A dark, feathered form rises behind one shoulder; a round golden structure frames the figure; boots rest amid a spread of coins. Those exact choices complicate the title’s familiar outlaw story. The subject appears less like a thief caught in action than someone already in possession of a treasure whose distribution remains in question. The political premise is direct, yet the scene makes room for legend and adventure rather than illustrating reparations as a policy chart.
This is one of Igbokwe’s central skills: making a speculative image carry a real social demand without flattening the figure into a slogan. The coins give the demand a visible material, while the feathered mass and circular frame keep the scene from reading as ordinary wealth portraiture. In a tale, the audience asks who the protagonist is, what they might recover and for whom. The painting’s title does not settle those questions, but the poised figure holds them open. The association between a legendary redistributor and a modern demand for repair is legible without requiring the artwork to act as a legislative proposal.
Igbokwe’s wider practice crosses commissioned illustration and personal painting. Heartwood, another 2019 oil painting on board, was commissioned for Heartwood: Non-Binary Tales of Sylvan Fantasy, a collection from Power & Magic Press. The project’s genre matters. Woodland fantasy has often borrowed its assumed heroes and visual norms from a narrow European tradition. A contribution by an artist concerned with Black queer possibility can alter who seems at home in that imagined landscape. The commission also places Igbokwe’s images in a book, where a reader encounters them beside stories by other creators rather than as isolated gallery objects.
The childhood that stayed in the studio
In a 2020 conversation with SAD Magazine, Igbokwe described making art as a childhood refuge. They remembered dancing and playing at being figures from animated adventure stories with their sister. That history helps explain why their mature work can hold ritual seriousness and exuberance together. A child’s game is an exercise in becoming: a body tries on powers and identities that ordinary life does not yet permit. Igbokwe’s paintings retain that imaginative permission while addressing the more complicated questions of ancestry and belonging that adulthood brought into view.
The artist’s education expanded the tools available to that childhood impulse. Training at RISD developed illustration and painting skills, while study of movement at Brown gave another model for storytelling through the body. These paths meet in images that think of a figure as someone in motion, even when the painted surface itself remains still. Igbokwe’s interest in animation, comics and video games is more than a list of influences. Those media ask audiences to follow characters through transformation. Their work brings that expectation to a single painting: the person pictured may seem to have arrived from a larger story and to continue beyond the frame.
There is a danger in describing every Black fantasy image as an escape from reality. Igbokwe’s own account makes the relationship more exact. Fantasy offers a way to think beyond the limits imposed by the present, while remaining attentive to the systems that shape the present. Their figures are not required to reproduce an injury for viewers to recognize its existence. They may instead embody another possibility. The imagined world becomes a place where a creator can test how freedom might feel before it has been secured in ordinary life.
The artist has spoken of being the child of Nigerian immigrants, of queer and nonbinary identity, and of the complexity of moving through spaces in which others read them in ways that do not capture the whole person. Those experiences enter the work as a question of how many identities a figure can hold at once. An ancestral reference does not cancel a comic-book influence. Queerness does not cancel a relationship to a family history. A painting can give these elements simultaneous form without forcing one to serve as the explanation for all the others.
A calendar for a new beginning
Igbokwe’s current site presents a later body of work through a hybrid oracle and tarot series called Spirit Child. One painting, Eke ● 1 (Otu), is made in oils on paper and measures sixteen by twenty inches. The artist connects Eke to the beginning of the traditional Igbo market-day calendar and to purification, light and a new beginning. The written accompaniment offers ways to read the image in different directions, including aliveness on one side and restraint on the other. A card-like painting invites interpretation rather than a single fixed answer.
The format makes a useful comparison with Dance of the Summoner. In 2019, the named figures helped Igbokwe reconnect with ancestral and diasporic spiritual traditions through painting. The later Spirit Child work turns that exploration into an interpretive system. A viewer can consider a painted image as an invitation to reflect on timing, energy and choice. The system is personal and artistic; the site describes it as a hybrid oracle and tarot series. Its relation to the Igbo calendar is stated by Igbokwe, rather than inferred from a symbol by an outside viewer.
Eke also shows why it would be too simple to say that Igbokwe has moved from ancient material toward a modern future. Their work moves among times. An inherited calendar gives structure to a contemporary painting series, while the artwork is offered to viewers who may encounter it online, in print or as an original object. The same image can belong to a tradition of marking days, to a new personal mythology and to the present circulation of independent art. None of those positions erases the others.
The artist’s site includes newer paintings with titles such as The Garden, The Lovers and The Strength. Their sequence suggests an ongoing interest in archetypal roles and thresholds, but the titles alone do not turn them into a complete story. The more revealing fact is that Igbokwe continues to make an evolving pictorial language through which personal, ancestral and speculative subjects can meet. Eke gives that project a concrete form: an oil painting whose stated reference to the first Igbo market day makes beginning itself a subject.
The many uses of a myth
Igbokwe’s practice also offers an answer to a persistent question about Afrofuturism: must an image depict a distant year or advanced machine? Their own use of the term has little need for a spaceship. The future appears in the freedom to envision Black queer lives with more possibilities than current conventions allow. Myth is not opposed to that future. It supplies figures, patterns and energies that the artist can transform. The work joins an awareness of historical fracture to an insistence that imagination remains available after fracture.
This approach brings an ethical demand. An ancestral image can be borrowed without care, especially when the people and practices associated with it are treated as visual resources. Igbokwe’s position is different because they describe the series as part of their own effort to reckon with Nigerian and diasporic inheritance. Their paintings are openly personal interpretations. That honesty leaves room for other descendants to have different relationships to the same traditions. It also keeps the viewer attentive to the fact that a contemporary painting is an artistic proposition, not a universal account of sacred practice.
The personal dimension does not make the work private. Igbokwe has said they value the moment when a viewer feels seen by an image. That connection can happen through a detail of identity, but it can also come through a painting’s mood or narrative possibility. Someone may recognize a family story; another may recognize the desire to belong in a world whose heroes once looked unlike them. The paintings do not need every viewer to share the artist’s background. They ask viewers to recognize that an imaginative life can be particular and expansive at the same time.
The artist’s movement between illustration and oil painting reinforces that openness. A board painting can be exhibited as an original object, while its reproduction may travel through a magazine or digital page. A book commission places an image beside a written story; an oracle-like series invites a reader to return to it with changing questions. Each format changes the pace and manner of encounter. Igbokwe works across them without surrendering the distinctiveness of the drawn or painted figure.
Krull’s conversation about futuristic dreams in the Congo diaspora offers a related question about who gets to picture a future and what inherited material enters that picture. Igbokwe’s answer is grounded in the act of making: paint can turn a remembered or researched tradition into a scene where a person is able to move, play and choose. Their 2019 summoner calls on history; the later Spirit Child series offers a way to consider what might begin next. Between those works lies an artist’s sustained refusal to let the future be severed from the many lives and stories that make it imaginable.