Exhibit: Odili Donald Odita: 3 Steps from Center

3 STEPS FROM CENTER

Internationally renowned artist, Odili Donald Odita—who immigrated with his family from Nigeria to Columbus, Ohio in the 1970s—will spend two weeks in Dayton creating a site-specific mural for The Co’s galleries, drawing upon both his own cultural experience and the history at play in The Dayton Arcade, one of the most historic structures in Dayton. The mural will feature kaleidoscopic color and patterns that he uses to reflect the human condition and, specific to The Co mural, the histories of the Arcade and Dayton as a diverse, Midwestern community. For Odita, color in itself has the possibility of mirroring the complexity of the world as much as it has the potential for being distinct. In his paintings and murals, he thinks of his colors as agents to express thoughts, ideas, place, time, and transformational change. Much of his color selection is based on personal memories and created intuitively by hand-mixing so that no two shades are ever repeated.