Ọmọlará Williams McCallister (pronouns: o, love, beloved) collaborates with people and plants to create immersive installations that support in communities cultivating cultures of collective power and care while navigating the everyday violences of systemic oppression. O’s work is a call and response blend of sculpture, performance, installation, ritual, space holding, community building, surface design, adornment, word, sound, song, movement, moving images and photography. The roles that Ọmọlará steps into include: artist, educator, organizer, cultural strategist, conjurer. In all forms O’s work is immersive and interactive, it is co-authored by the people and environments who inspire and encounter it.
Ọ is based in Miami, FL. Ọmọlará was born and raised in from Atlanta, Ga. Ọ’s artistic journey began in church at 7 years old as a classically trained vocalist and bassist. Love attended Dekalb School of the Arts, a magnet 8 – 12 public school. Beloved has actively organized around social justice issues on the local, regional and national levels since age 13. Ọmọlará’s upbringing in the Black south–particularly in the traditions of the southern Black churches–is the foundation for Ọ’s work.
Ọ has garnered numerous awards and accolades to support love’s work. In 2023 and 2024 Ọ’s work has been supported by their chosen family and: Knight Foundation (Miami, FL); O, Miami Miami, FL); IS Projects ( Miami, FL); El Espacio 23 (Miami, FL); American Craft Council ( Minneapolis, MN); Gist Yarn; the Winterthur Museum, Gardens & Library (Winterthur, DE); VisArts ( Richmond, VA); Monson Arts (Monsoon, ME); Maryland State Arts Council (Baltimore, MD); Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA), and private collectors.
Omolará Williams McCallister, ‘Follow Me’
Five years ago, the first of these masquerades interrupted my studio practice to birth themselves. When I saw it, I immediately knew what it was but I had a few questions for them:
Who are you? Who sent you? What are your intentions? What have you come here to do? Did you bring anyone with you? Am I safe with you? And Why me?
They also had a question for me:
How can I work in ways that honor the craft traditions in my lineages while honoring the lands that I currently occupy?
I’ve spent the last 5 years listening for and responding to this call to deepen my ancestral practice by learning to live with the land and the gifts that it offers me. In all of my lineages people applied their labor to using the materials that were freely, abundantly available in their immediate surroundings.
I’ve had 32 different addresses in the last 6 years-chronic housing insecurity has been a throughline of my life. My immediate surroundings, the land has been different in each place. The land has also been generous in each place. It has required me to learn different things in order to be able to work with and honor these gifts.
I’ve learned to identify, forage, and process organic materials into twine, yarn, rope, and paper. l’ve learned to weave fabric. I’ve learned to build structures and frameworks out of sticks, grasses, and stalks. I’ve learned all the ways that things can become beads. I’ve deepened my natural dye and adornment practices.
The materials that you experience in this installation are all gifts that the different lands that I have occupied have offered me. These materials are all my teachers and community members. They are an archive of the places that have shaped me. This installation includes birchbark that I| harvested in Vermont; cattail twine that I made in Virginia; porcupine quills offered to me by roadkill porcupines in Maine; shoes from horses that I worked with in Spain; corn cobs from Baltimore; Ackee tree wood from Miami. There is cloth that I wove in LA, Atlanta, Boston, NYC, D.C. There are KN95 masks that kept me alive through all of it.
Gratitude to Green Space Miami for giving me an opportunity to be able to actually sit with these works for the first time. To get to know them better over the duration of this installation.
Gratitude to all of the human teachers who have shared with me: Rose Whitehead, Alice Seeger, Becky Ashenden, Wanesia Spry Misquadace, Academia Jalon, Sarah at Caballo Blanco, my broom making teacher at Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts.
Gratitude to these materials for offering themselves to me, for giving me their life’s worth of labor.
Gratitude to all of the lands that have held and supported me in my life and practice.
Gratitude to these masquerades for choosing me, for guiding me, for walking with me on this journey. I give thanks.
