Toyin Ojih Odutola was born in Nigeria and immigrated with her family as a young child to a conservative community in the American South. Drawing on her own diasporic experience, she creates complexly rendered portraits in black ballpoint pen that address the social and political associations of skin color. “I came to ballpoint pen,” she explains, “with a need to render how skin felt like to me…skin as a striated terrain, and in a broader sense, the concept of a portrait as a platform for creating a sense of place.”