How do you guarantee that your art won't be ignored? Putting it on billboards along one of Pittsburgh’s busiest routes is one way. Not that Mikael Owunna, a queer Nigerian-Swedish American multimedia artist, needs to always resort to such tactics, as his striking experimental prints easily draw viewers in.
His work focuses less on promoting himself, however, and more on making visible the Black experience in Pittsburgh and beyond. A previous Pittsburgh City Paper article reports that Infinite Essence: Celestial Liberation, the 2021 project that posted Owunna’s breathtaking photos along Route 28 and other areas, served as a response to “negative stereotypes and pervasive images of Black death depicted in the media.”
His work has, over the years, expanded beyond the galleries and into projects that directly support local artists. This year, he co-founded Rainbow Serpent, a nonprofit organization described as advancing the culture, healing, and empowerment of the Black LGBTQ community. He also serves as the current president of the City of Pittsburgh Public Art and Civic Design Commission.
“One of the big transformations for me has been really having the opportunity to work collaboratively with other Black LGBTQ artists and thinking about how to build infrastructure for Black queer artists, technologists, and healers in the city and the region at large,” Owunna tells City Paper.
These collaborations have led to more visible projects, including installations produced with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and The Andy Warhol Museum. Owunna, whose own artistic practice seeks to revive endangered knowledge systems based around a “queer African myth of creation,” believes these public art projects, done collectively through Rainbow Serpent, “multipl[y] the impact of any individual’s work.”
Owunna reveals that, for 2024, Rainbow Serpent will continue its work with the debut of a group exhibition at the Pittsburgh Glass Center featuring 16 sculptures that bring “little-known queer African deities into a contemporary context.”
Owunna says that, as a native Pittsburgher who grew up in Highland Park, he has noticed the city investing more in Black artists. However, he notes that a lot of work still needs to be done in order to retain and support this community, and hopes to contribute significantly to those efforts.
“Long term, when I am gone as an individual, what is the legacy that I’ve left behind?” he says.
