Ayana V. Jackson and Ebele Okobi

Two Women Reframing the Meaning of Art

By Bonnie Langedijk

Art serves us in more ways than one. It can bring us joy, beauty and escapism, it can be used as a vehicle to hold up a mirror to ourselves or it can be a force for revolution, change and political or social commentary. While there’s been a consistent dialogue between art and humanity for centuries, now more than ever we’re in need of art and its unique ability to help us to tell the stories and tragedies of our time. 

One artist who has used her lens to portray the important stories of our time is Ayana V. Jackson. Her photography assesses the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography through the deconstruction of 19th and early 20th century portraiture. She explores themes around race, gender and reproduction and often casts herself in the role of historical figures. Over the years Jackson’s work has been collected by major local and international institutions and influential art enthusiasts. Amongst those avid collectors is ​values-led, transformational leader and art patron Ebele Okobi. A former corporate lawyer, Okobi worked across some of the key nonprofit organizations as well as some of the biggest corporate brands. She worked in brand strategy across Africa and the women’s business at Nike, was the Global Head of Human Rights at Yahoo and built and led Facebook’s first ever Africa and then Africa Middle East and Turkey policy teams. Both women sit at the intersection of art and social justice, using their platforms to amplify the voices and stories often left unheard. Jackson and Okobi connected with HURS over a zoom call and discussed how they ended up in their current careers, what it means to be a Black artist and the importance of Black funders and collectors.

Ebele: What led you to be an artist? As a black person, as a woman, it's a pretty bold thing to dedicate your life to.

Ayana: It was more my inheritance than my choice. My great-grandfather was a student and follower of Marcus Garvey. My grandfather, his son, was an educator and the first Black Principal in the Essex County, New Jersey School system, where I'm from. My Grandmother, his wife, always carried the camera as the couple worked and traveled around the world. Their son, my father, taught me how to shoot film manually. Through them I learned to both educate and tell stories about places near and far through images. 

Ebele: I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating. 

Ayana: There's always been a Pan-Africanist conversation in the family that discussed a unifying relationship between the Caribbean, the Americas and Africa, but also this desire to figure out where home is and get back there. I became an activist through photography, as that was the largest tool I had at my disposal. I didn’t intend or dream about being an artist. I just had a mandate that I felt was handed down to me. The first body of work of photography that I made was in Mexico. I wrote my thesis on race relations in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the distinctions between North and Central America versus the Southern cone including Argentina, where they had a genocide of Black people. 

Ebele: Really? I don't think I've even seen that.

Ayana: It's before I started working with my body. Prior to that, I was shooting around Venezuela, Mexico, and Columbia. I did a residency and that’s where I started experimenting with my body.
Ebele: It's funny because while I followed you, I didn't know that was a genesis. 

“I became an ACTIVIST through photography, as that was the largest tool I had at my disposal.”

Ayana: I don’t know how it’s with your career, but I feel like I’ve been married to my practice. Even though there’s a lot of fun in what I do, I don't know that I ever really focused on giving myself a chance to have love and be loved. You have a family, but do you find it hard to find a work-life balance? 

Ebele: To be honest it was less work and more having a billion kids. We both always had jobs that we were really interested in, and there was no conflict between that and love. My idea of love is not sitting in a room gazing at each other. There’s this Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who says that when you deeply love someone, you’re holding their hands facing the world. My partner and I are both passionate about Black people, about justice, about adventure and making the world a better place. Even our creation of children was very connected to wanting to build these little social justice warriors. 

Ayana: When you mentioned creating these social justice activist babies, what would you say activated you to do the work that you’re doing in the social justice space?

Ebele: That’s such a great question. Throughout my life there have been different inflection points. I grew up feeling like I stood on the shoulders of giants. My maternal grandmother was part of the Aba Women’s revolution for example. I come from people who did hard things, who were very intentional and deliberate about community so that’s my base. 

Ayana: Incredible.

Ebele: I decided from a very young age that I was going to pursue a career in law. After Columbia, I went to a firm that was considered an elite firm and I hated it. When I looked at the partners and their lives – which I was meant to aspire to – I had no respect for them. Three years in I decided I quit and took a year off to do a sabbatical, which is not a thing in Nigerian childhood. September 11 happened and one of my best friends was killed in the attack. I knew, after the horrible reminder of how short life can be, that I could never go back to wasting my life doing work that isn’t connected to mission and purpose. 

It became fundamentally clear to me that even if I lived until I was 90, I had no guarantee that I had a lot of life to waste. I couldn't see myself going back to a job that felt like it wasn't connected to mission and purpose.

Ayana: Where did you go from there?

Ebele: After that I worked in non profit and civil society for five years. But you often end up begging companies and governments to change. I wanted to be closer to power. I worked with Nike on their Africa business and it was interesting to see to what extent colonization and white supremacy shaped corporate practices. It convinced me of the huge importance of having people who are loud, who understand business, who understand how to work levels of power and who care about social justice working in these environments. 

Ayana: Completely.

Ebele: Another inflection point was when my youngest brother was murdered by the police in 2018. He was walking down the sidewalk in San Mateo and he was stopped by police. Within 15 minutes they had tasered him to death and left his body in the street like a bag of garbage. It’s disgusting to say, but that’s a classic American tale, right? Between 2018 and 2021 I was fueled very much by rage. Obviously my brother happened in October of 2018, and the pandemic hit in 2020, and then the world discovered racism.

Ayana: Right.

Ebele: People were talking about it as if it was some sort of new problem. My brother had been on a sidewalk dying, two years before, and it didn't matter. I made it my mission to focus on justice and dismantling systems of oppression. After last year – which I took off as my year of joy when I quit my job at Facebook – I’m moving much more from the space of love for Black people. The rage I felt was necessary, but it felt destructive for me. There’s a way in which Black people are forced to focus on rage to the detriment of joy and love. There are so few spaces of safety and joy and love for Black people, and I want to be part of creating them. 

Ayana: Wow. What do I even say? Thank you. As Black people, as people of color or as queer people, we live with a baseline of trauma and expectation of lack of safety. We have normalized this insecurity. Your status quo shouldn’t be the expectation of violence, it should be the expectation of continuous joy, harmony and love as you say. Obviously we have social justice heroes and activists. And we have people like yourself, and I would like to say – through my work – myself who dedicate our legacy to fighting against it. But at the same time, there’s a majority of our community that’s living with this constant state of fear and trauma. 

Ebele: Absolutely. Black people deserve beauty. Beauty and culture helps you bear the world as it is. But the body of art that I love doesn't just stop there. It’s art as a sword. There’s the challenge creators who use art to shine the light on injustice and then there’s those who use art to help us imagine the world as it should be. Liberation begins in radical imagination. That’s why art is fundamental and foundational. It’s so important to have Black people funding work that’s imagining a new world. My interest isn’t only in buying art but also to try and support young and emerging Black artists in particular. Your work is both visually stunning, it’s smart, it’s packed with many references to history and to feminist theory. Being able to support and to be in community and communion with art like that feeds my soul. 

Ayana: I appreciate that. Whenever I learn that a collector of mine is Black, it’s a very emotional experience for me. There isn’t enough of our cultural capital, whether its historic, traditional, from time of memorial or contemporary, that’s in the hands of those of us who it belongs to ultimately, right?

Ebele: Completely. 

Ayana: As a part of the African Diasporic community that’s involved in this ongoing moment – I really don’t like to consider it as a trend – of investment and attention towards our creativity, it’s a moment we need to grasp and then we need to grow. There are lots of galleries like Mariane Ibrahim that have an open door policy to Black collectors. Mariane knows how much it means to me to have Black collectors. 

Ebele: Absolutely.

Ayana: I wonder if you can be a Black artist and not be an activist. Is being a Black artist an activism within itself? Are we allowed as Black artists to create purely out of imaginaries? 

Ebele: My point of view is that a Black artist whose practice insists only upon joy and imagination is revolutionary, even if the person doesn't mean to be. Sitting, creating and being a black person in this “global” art marketplace is radical. We’re not allowed to just be creative. But to be someone who can have the boot on your neck and still say, I will insist on joy, is radical.

Ayana: That brings to mind, and it happened to be the title of the show that I curated, “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” a famous quote by Sojourner Truth. There’s a lot of ways to break that down, but what I’m thinking about at the moment is that in this commerce of black art, we’re putting this memento, this object or image out into the world. It’s almost like selling the shadow, but the main point is to support the substance, which is the message of liberation. The demonstration of resistance. I agree with you that supporting Black activism through art is a radical thing to do. You’re not just supporting individuals, but you’re supporting ideas. 

Ebele: I couldn’t agree more. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.  

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