The artist conceives new ways to connect through gardens, poetry, and explorations of the unconscious in their recent work and a series of self-portraits for L’OFFICIEL.

PHOTOGRAPHY Dozie Kanu
STYLED BY Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen

When I meet Precious Okoyomon at their East Village apartment on a rainy Saturday morning, the 33-year-old artist has just finished meditating. “I meditate every day, and I’m a big fan of something called darkness meditation, which I do once a year,” they tell me. This involves retreating to Upstate New York and sitting in the dark for days on end. “I was born prematurely at five months, and spent the first four months of my life in an incubator,” they say. “A lot unfolds going back to the darkness.”
Okoyomon has often felt pulled between their love of people and protecting themself, so recharging through meditation is necessary after a whirlwind decade. Since 2018, their immersive, frequently haunting work—spanning gardens, sculpture, poetry, drawing, and performance—has appeared across institutions in Europe and the United States, as well as at the Venice Biennale in 2022, 2024, and 2026. This past year has been a New York coup, with major installations at the Whitney Biennial, New Museum, and MoMA PS1. In person, the energy they run on is like a beam of sunshine and moonlight intertwined—glowing and contemplative, feeling and cerebral, bursting with ideas expressed with precision.
Their living space feels like an oasis in Manhattan, easy on the senses with soft colors, surfaces, and lighting. Piles of stuffed animals—one of their signature objects—cluster every few feet. A pink bookshelf, custom-made by their friend Bolt Brown, displays a heavyweight philosophical, poetic, and intellectual library. Gilles Deleuze, Édouard Glissant. The collected poems of Bertolt Brecht, W. B. Yeats, and Emily Dickinson. Classics of social commentary–driven magical realism and sci-fi by Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Toni Morrison. Texts by Carl Jung and Alice Miller hint at their enduring interest in psychoanalysis.

Exploring the unconscious, in particular, has become a big part of Okoyomon’s life: They have routinely done psychoanalysis for the past seven years. “I’m unlocking a lot that is deeply tunneled down in there,” they say. “It’s a fun, crazy place where I’m finding grace in being allowed to regress into old versions of myself. There’s joy in 5- or 10-year-old Precious.”
It was during childhood that Okoyomon began unearthing a creative wellspring within. Then and now, their primary mode of expression has been poetry, which informs their visual-art endeavors. “If I had a disagreement with my mom, I would write her a poem and slip it under her door,” they recall. “It’s my way of communicating, and that has never changed.” As an emotional outlet, poetry—alongside a simmering curiosity they’d satisfy at the library—served as an anchor throughout. moves from London to Lagos, Houston to small-town Ohio, and at last to Shimer College in Chicago. “I had such a fragmented childhood with so many different realities,” they say. “But from a young age I learned what the gift of being yourself is, and the rootedness that comes in that.”
Their poetic voice is “like a radio signal I tune into,” they say. “It’s like my frequency with God.” Vivid, often bizarre dreams will stay with them for years before emerging in poems. In their first poetry chapbook,&nbsp;Ajebota (2016), one excerpt reads: I’ve been having dreams about my exes lately, we’re in this glass box / and they’re watching us perform sexual acts on each other. They are / judging us with score cards, but instead of numbers it’s just pictures / of dolphins eating different kinds of cakes.
Later, as captured in their poetry book But Did You Die? (2024), lambs began haunting their subconscious. “Notes from the Glass Coffin” narrates a dream about the baby animal, alone and crying, before “learning to love the lamb body / the broken hooves / The twisted black coat.” From the same collection, “Benediction of the Lamb”—which describes “a lamb with fang and no shepherd”—arose from conversations with Anne Boyer. The Pulitzer-winning poet had penned the 2014 essay “When the Lambs Rise Up Against the Bird of Prey,” refuting Friedrich Nietzsche’s characterization of the creature as weak and helpless.

Okoyomon’s interest in Boyer’s text eventually culminated in a postapocalyptic-themed installation with the same title, first realized in a 2024 show curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Hidden among the lush trees and plant life of an artificial mountain grotto in Madrid’s El Retiro Park, shrouded in a haze of steam, rested the protagonist: a Black lamb-girl sculpture with white ears sticking out of long blond hair, woolly hoofed limbs, and a lacy nightgown. The animatronic figure swayed back and forth, alert eyes scanning their surroundings. Scents of earth and greenery filled the space, while a soundtrack combined Okoyomon’s poems with the multi-sensory musical piece Mysterium, begun by composer Alexander Scriabin in 1903. The lamb-girl later traveled to New York City for New Humans, the New Museum’s watershed reopening exhibition, which debuted in March. There, she appeared in a new setting: a brightly lit wall niche lined with cotton candy-pink insulation. (“It keeps her safe but it can kill you,” says Okoyomon of the material, adding that it reminds them of when they’d hide in the attic as a child.) From the dark, fertile environs in Europe to the fluorescent, Pepto-Bismol–hued asylum-like holding across the Atlantic, the lamb-girl is weathering danger—and is stronger than she appears. “The lamb at the end of the world [is] watching, waiting, and silently witnessing,” says Okoyomon. “There is a lot of power in being a lamb.”

Obrist, who first worked with Okoyomon in 2019 on a play for Park Nights, a series of interdisciplinary artistic engagements at Serpentine Galleries, immediately understood the artist’s practice as “fluid between poetry, installation, music, and ecology,” he says. “And the idea from the beginning of bringing all these dimensions together in gardens.
A fascination with gardens also traces back to Okoyomon’s early childhood, when they were often recruited to help their grandmother tend to her plants. “The only thing she ever showed softness to was nature—not even us, her grandkids,” they say. “It taught me how the thing that holds you is sometimes the soil.” More and more, Okoyomon has wielded flora-based installations as a foreboding commentary on ecological destruction. In those contexts, the implicit assumption is that the apocalypse is inevitable, and in fact has already been happening. Though, they add, “I think it would help if we de-centered the human in this coming century.
Among their takeaways from self-guided adventures in horticulture has been forgiveness of invasive species. “People view them as monstrosities in a way that I’ve never understood, because most of the monstrosities we make by our own hands,” says Okoyomon. “I have space for weeds, things that people consider problems.” Across multiple shows they have incorporated kudzu, a vine native to East Asia that is now considered invasive in the American South. But its use was actively endorsed by the government between the 1930s and ’50s as a means of stabilizing topsoil. It thrived, but then took over. “It only did the thing you asked it to do,” they say. “Then it swallowed plantation land that was already baptized with evil blood.”

Their garden concepts increasingly invoke such ideologies. For Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation in the front yard of MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York, which opened in July, Okoyomon conceived a sprawling garden that will evolve with the seasons over the next two years, mixing native and invasive plants—in the range of, they estimate, 1,500 annuals and perennials, and 60 trees. “I love gardens that feel like wild meadows,” they say of the project. “I love when you can’t control things—I find it humbling.”
At the center of Among the Flowers... is a giant bear sculpture that doubles as a playground slide—another vehicle for relinquishing control—where guests enter the character’s backside and exit out of its gaping mouth. (Cue puns about becoming whole again.) Watching people of all ages go down the slide was a reminder that “everyone wants to be held,” says Okoyomon. The sentiment nods to Bracha L. Ettinger’s concept of the “matrixial borderspace,” which characterizes subjectivity as developing through shared encounters—an idea close to the artist’s heart. “Vulnerability isn’t something you can do by yourself,” they reflect. “It requires someone witnessing you.”
Running parallel to this impulse—namely, devising spaces that lull people into comfort—is also how cuteness can serve as, in the artist’s words, a “Trojan horse” to deal with darker issues. “It can be an easier way of digesting something that feels other to you, or scary, or inaccessible,” they say. A long-running motif in Okoyomon’s installations is a stuffed animal, affixed with taxidermied bird wings, hanging by a noose. In their vision, these are immortal, celestial beings with the capability of flight, yet also immobilized, forced to hover in place to prevent eternal suffocation—circumstances that Okoyomon has connected to Black life in America. At this year’s Whitney Biennial, a fleet of their angels—hybrids of rabbits, bears, lambs, and other critters—dangled across the eighth floor of the museum in a piece titled Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid. Guests would breezily snap photos, even posing with the creatures. “You see these cute stuffed animals that you can relate to because they are adhered to your childhood,” says Okoyomon. “Then you’re like, Boom. Actually, innocence is never innocent! We’re fully inducted into this idea of white-supremacist abduction from childhood, because there is no safe space from that. We’re in it. And how do we break out of it?”

Perhaps it all comes back to the unconscious. Synthesizing their core ideas—especially in contemplating the fundamental question of how we can live in harmony on Earth—Okoyomon is working to launch the new Institute for the Collective Unconscious. Its aim is to investigate “altered states of consciousness and the conditions under which another kind of knowledge might emerge,” they say, particularly searching for states of consciousness that could transcend the individual body. The idea originated with a performance, the Existential Detective Agency, first staged at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2025. Inside of rooms resembling Jung’s office, lab coat–clad existential detectives prompted visitors with 12 questions probing their dreams and memories. “Seeing all the answers, and how they flowed with everyone else’s, I thought, I need to make this bigger,” says Okoyomon. While the idea for the ICU is still nascent, the artist imagines it encompassing everything from a digital dream archive to an incubator for various tools—like a concept for a robotic device designed to sync up the breathing of participants—to a hub bringing together artists, psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, philosophers, musicians, and AI and dream researchers alike.
“We know other knowledge is possible...It just requires a little rewiring,” they say. “I want to touch you and leave you changed."
Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst and School for Social Research, met Okoyomon in 2024 in the planning phases of the Kunsthaus Bregenz exhibition. It was actually Ettinger—a shared idol—who brokered the introduction. They instantly connected over psychoanalysis and poetry. “We started on breathing, dreams, the unconscious, transformations deep in the body or the earth, trauma,” says Webster. “Hacking the unconscious is a big one,” she continues, with more direct means being a holy grail in her field. “If anyone figures it out, it will be an artist and not a psychoanalyst. And I’d bet on Precious.”

All of the emphasis on cooperation and collectivity can seem counterintuitive in the art world, I point out, as a place that so vehemently fetishizes individual creative genius. “I refuse to consent to [that]. I’m like, I will shatter my ego,” Okoyomon says. “I believe that the real cosmic love work is to be open.” In devising their original self-portrait for this issue, they orchestrated the shoot as a collaboration among trusted friends: captured at a Queen Anne–style Victorian home in New Jersey by Dozie Kanu, who has long been their go-to photographer, and styled by buzzy New York–based designer Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, who frequently creates the artist’s custom clothes.
For Okoyomon, it really does come down to having fun with the friends they make on the journey. “I am trying very hard for people to play with me,” they say. “We are usually super disconnected from play, or we only think it can happen in childhood. But it’s an everyday fragment of our world. Once I gave myself the ability to play with other people, it opened up everything.”

HAIR: Jaz Shepard using ORIBE
MAKEUP: Sophie Hartnett using HUDA BEAUTY
CREATIVE PRODUCER: Emily Adar

Self-portrait creative-directed by Precious Okoyomon, photographed by Dozie Kanu, and styled by Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen. Dresses ZOE GUSTAVIA ANNA WHALEN Veil STYLIST’S OWN Brooch ARCHIVIO J.M. RIBOT

Precious Okoyomon Is A Dreamer By Nature

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