ARTISTS TO KNOW: CHELSEA ODUFU
Photography: Avery Savage; Creative Direction & Production: Bianca Jean-Pierre & Avery Savage
To close out The Shed’s Open Call: Portals series, we’re honored to feature Chelsea Odufu, a visionary artist whose practice moves fluidly across film, photography, sculpture, performance, and design. Her installation Gold with a Mind of Its Own investigates the enduring legacy of the gold trade in Côte d’Ivoire, using dance and movement as a language to process history through the body. The result is a work that speaks to both the weight of that legacy, offering a space where reflection and resistance can coexist.
Her broader practice brings together research, ancestral listening, and intuition to shape a storytelling approach that feels both grounded and expansive. From sculptural masks to virtual production, Chelsea moves effortlessly between mediums to explore the depth and complexity of the Black experience across geographies. She also leads Tech Afrique, a creative studio exploring innovation across the African diaspora, runs her couture hat label Astheria, and directs campaigns for brands like Chanel and Bose.
Now living between Abidjan and New York, Chelsea brings a global perspective to everything she creates, shaped by movement across mediums, across continents, and across dimensions of Black identity.
Chelsea Odufu interviewed by Bianca Jean-Pierre and photographed by Avery Savage for SHEER.
Bianca Jean-Pierre: Your work often channels a powerful spiritual and ancestral frequency. What inner or external rituals guide your creative process and how does that intuitive way of working evolve across mediums like film, sculpture, and performance?
Chelsea Odufu: I can’t say I have any conscious rituals, I’m not lighting candles or meditating or praying for ideas to arrive, I think of myself more as a vessel moving through life, placing myself in spaces where I can glimpse cultures that have preserved their ancestral memory for centuries.
I listen to a lot of Afrohouse music—the steady BPM and frequency can put me in a kind of transcendental state where fragmented ideas or visions start to surface. With sculpture, the intuitive process lives in my hands, just moving, developing characters, and allowing them to reveal themselves as they’re built, and in film it’s about tapping into the depth of human emotion, knowing how to pull those emotions forward, or making the right creative decision at the right moment. My practice is really a balance of cultural creative anthropology, electro frequencies, and intuitive creation.
“My practice is really a balance of cultural creative anthropology, electro frequencies, and intuitive creation.”
Bianca: Gold with a Mind of Its Own speaks to the haunting legacy of the gold trade in Côte d’Ivoire through movement and dance. How did you arrive at using the body as the central language of this installation, and what traces of the past or acts of resistance did you want viewers to feel in the space?
Chelsea: Gold is a material, but it’s also a spirit—it carries memory, and I wanted the body to be the vessel that makes those memories visible. Dance allowed me to express the weight and beauty of that legacy without words, because the history of the gold trade in West Africa is as much felt as it is known. I wanted viewers to sense both the seduction and the violence of that history—the shimmer of wealth and the shadow of exploitation—while feeling the act of moving through it as a form of resistance, a reclaiming of the narrative through the body’s own authority.
“Gold is a material, but it’s also a spirit—it carries memory, and I wanted the body to be the vessel that makes those memories visible.”
Bianca: You’ve lived and worked between New York and Abidjan, carving a life that feels both grounded and expansive. What has it been like relocating to Côte d’Ivoire and how has being immersed in that cultural and spiritual landscape reshaped your relationship to time, space, and creativity?
Chelsea: Abidjan didn’t slow me down, it gave me room to breathe and focus. It's a vibrant city but there’s a peacefulness here that allows my mind to think more expansively. Being here has opened my practice in so many ways. There are incredible artisans whose skills in material practices have been passed down for generations, and I’ve been able to work alongside and learn from them. It feels like a place of unlimited ancestral creativity and I deeply value the accessibility to that. I live between Abidjan and New York, but I’m also constantly traveling to other places for projects, residencies, and inspiration. My work is always in conversation with location, each place shifting how I experience time, shaping my relationship to space, and leaving an imprint on the work. In Abidjan, time feels generous, it’s not about the rush, but about depth—making room for ideas to mature while being surrounded by a living archive of craft, culture, and tradition.
“Staying rooted comes from remembering that the work is an extension of me, not the other way around, and if I’m aligned internally, the multidimensionality feels natural, not overwhelming.”
Bianca: You’ve moved fluidly between the worlds of visual art, fashion, and commercial storytelling while also running your own couture hat label and leading Tech Afrique. How do you stay rooted while navigating such a multidimensional practice? Do these lanes feed different parts of your spirit or is it all one holistic expression?
Chelsea: It’s all one ecosystem for me, whether I’m designing a hat, producing a film, or curating a Tech Afrique experience, I’m working with the same ingredients—story, rhythm, and vision. The forms may change, but they’re constantly feeding each other, fashion teaches me precision and elegance, commercial work sharpens my storytelling, and visual art keeps me connected to my why. Staying rooted comes from remembering that the work is an extension of me, not the other way around, and if I’m aligned internally, the multidimensionality feels natural, not overwhelming.
“In Abidjan, time feels generous, it’s not about the rush, but about depth—making room for ideas to mature while being surrounded by a living archive of craft, culture, and tradition.”
Bianca: Afrofuturism is a current through your work, not just aesthetically, but philosophically. What does the future look or feel like to you right now and how do you see your art helping to shape or imagine liberated Black futures?
Chelsea: For me, the future isn’t some distant sci-fi horizon, it’s something we’re actively building in real time through the choices we make and the stories we tell today. I envision it as a space where Black people have complete agency over our narratives. Where our cultural knowledge is celebrated as innovation, not just preserved as heritage, and my art serves as a rehearsal for that reality—centering our worlds, embracing unapologetic aesthetics, and honoring our histories as the blueprint for what comes next. The future, to me, is about showing Black people—again and again—how limitless we truly are.
Bianca: In your work, the past and future don’t exist in opposition—they're woven together. Whether through archival imagery or virtual production tools, what possibilities open up when time becomes nonlinear?
Chelsea: Time is a construct, but memory and imagination are fluid, and in African and diasporic traditions the past is never truly past—it’s alive, guiding, and constantly in conversation with the present. By collapsing time, I can place an ancestor and a future self in the same space, allowing them to share knowledge, confront each other, or dream together, creating a richer understanding of who we are and who we can be. I’m drawn to this approach because it removes the linear limits that often shape our understanding of history and possibility. It lets me create spaces where traditional craft and cutting-edge technology can exist side by side, where rituals from centuries ago live alongside imagined futures.
When time becomes nonlinear, the work stops being about nostalgia or prediction, it becomes a living, breathing continuum, and in that continuum there’s infinite room for transformation, healing, and liberation.
“For me, the future isn’t some distant sci-fi horizon, it’s something we’re actively building in real time through the choices we make and the stories we tell today. I envision it as a space where Black people have complete agency over our narratives.”
Bianca: Having exhibited everywhere from the Dakar Biennale to The Shed’s Open Call: Portals, you’re building a global language of storytelling. How do you choose which stories to tell and what responsibility, if any, do you feel to your audience or your lineage when crafting a new piece?
Chelsea: I’m drawn to the stories that won’t leave me alone, the ones that circle back in dreams, conversations, or sudden flashes of imagery, often emerging from places where personal memory intersects with collective history, where the intimate and the ancestral overlap. I feel a deep responsibility to authentically tell stories that are empowering and nuanced, showing the complexities and brilliance of our narratives, my work is in constant dialogue with the cultures, traditions, and histories that shaped me, but I also believe that responsibility doesn’t mean being bound—it means being in honest conversation with the past while making space for my own truth to live and breathe.
I want the work to feel alive, whether it’s challenging, comforting, or unsettling, so that the audience isn’t just looking at something, but participating in a shared moment of recognition or questioning, and in that way, each piece is both a tribute and an offering toward where we might be headed.
“I’m drawn to the stories that won’t leave me alone, the ones that circle back in dreams, conversations, or sudden flashes of imagery, often emerging from places where personal memory intersects with collective history, where the intimate and the ancestral overlap.”
Bianca: You describe your practice as both research-driven and intuitive. Can you share a recent moment, while developing your installation for Open Call: Portals for example, when you had to trust your instinct over the research, or vice versa?
Chelsea: With Open Call: Portals, the research gave me a strong conceptual framework—everything from historical references to spatial design considerations—but the final decisions came from instinct. There was a point when I realized the piece needed to move beyond the safety of my initial plan on paper, but in the gallery space I could feel something missing. I trusted my gut and shifted the approach so the installation felt more like an active, living environment than a static set, rethinking how people entered, the lighting, and even how the edit would carry through the space. Those changes weren’t in the research, they came from listening to the energy in the room and imagining how a viewer’s body and spirit might move through it.
For me, research is the map, but instinct is the compass. I can study material culture, histories, and theory for months, but there’s always a moment when the work starts speaking back to me, and when that happens I let the intuition lead. That’s when the piece becomes alive rather than just accurate.
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Photography by Nabila Wirakusumah
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