NEW YORK, NY.- On May 5, 2026, Public Art Fund will present Woody De Othello: Guardian Spirit, the artist’s first major public art exhibition in New York. Installed throughout Brooklyn Bridge Park, the exhibition debuts new monumental redwood works alongside bronze sculptures made between 2021 and 2025. The exhibition continues the artist’s ongoing exploration of nkisi, ritual objects from Western and Central Africa that embody spiritual presences and channel protective or healing forces. Along the waterfront site, Othello abstracts the figure, vessel and other commonplace objects to point towards the dissolution of our physical bodies as we move through space, time and matter.
“For me, anything in the material world has the potential to become a ritual object,” says Othello. “Before something exists physically, it begins as thought. Sculpture is a way of pointing back to that unseen space, to the breath, the wind, the shared consciousness we’re all part of.”
Rising between 20 and 22 feet tall, Othello’s three new redwood totems introduce a vertical presence that responds directly to the park’s open sky, shifting winds, and proximity to water. The artist carved the totems from compressed blocks of wood using chainsaws and grinders. Each totem is filled with symbolic reliefs: outstretched hands for compassion, kneeling figures for reverence, ears for listening and birds for freedom. One gesture blends into the next, evoking the shifting ways we experience emotion, memory, and consciousness. The redwood sculptures will weather over time, registering the environment and marking the passage of the exhibition itself.
Communication is a recurring theme of the exhibition. In thought in mind, an enlarged bronze phone and comb suggest these objects’ outsized importance: how something as fleeting as a phone call can change the course of our lives. Capacity, inner knowing, and Involution feature trumpet horn-shaped appendages merging with ears and hands. The works suggest the connections between sensation and emotion, mirroring nkisi, which unify the physical and spiritual realms.
“Woody De Othello creates sculptures that feel both intimate and monumental,” says Jenée-Daria Strand, Assistant Curator at Public Art Fund. “He invites us to consider how art can hold space: for protection, for memory, and for connection, while ensuring the work remains approachable, and playful, through his use of recognizable objects. In Brooklyn Bridge Park, these works open outward, engaging the environment and the public.”
The sequencing of the sculptures across Brooklyn Bridge Park encourages movement and pause, prompting visitors to reflect on breath, listening, and the subtle forces that shape daily life.
Woody De Othello (b. 1991, Miami) works primarily in clay and bronze, manipulating mundane objects such as clocks, calendars, phones, and box fans to transform them into warped, uncanny repositories of psychic significance. This approach builds on the West and Central African concept of nkisi, in which objects contain and release spiritual forces; for Othello, each work is a vessel, even when it is physically sealed. His two-dimensional works also present surrealistic distortions of scale and temporality, invoking the familiar but confounding legibility. He lives in Oakland, California.
Recent institutional solo exhibitions include coming forth by day, currently on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin (2021–22); and San José Museum of Art, California (2019). His work was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept. Othello’s work is represented in the collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Baltimore Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Dallas Museum of Art; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Rennie Museum, Vancouver; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San José Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
