For their thesis presentation at school, Okoyomon hosted a series of experimental dinners that featured dishes like rock soup, and had guests dine under hanging rope nooses.
[2][3] Their installations, sculptures, performances, and poetry often draw from their family history as well as their encounters with queerness and the internet, and frequently return to figures like the angel, the sun, and trees as visual and conceptual motifs.
[11][12] Taking its title from a Youraba word meaning "spoiled rich kid," Okoyomon's first book of poetry, published by Bottlecap Press in 2016, explores the complexities of their identity as a black queer immigrant inhabiting a specific class position.
[14] The book which has been interpreted as a response to Alt Lit, cites Dana Ward, Hannah Black, Juliana Huxtable, Bhanu Kapil, Simone White, and Fred Moten among its many influences.
In a press release written by Okoyomon and Black, they propose that the exhibition "gestures towards a politics or aesthetics based on the underlying and frankly disgusting processes of rot and collapse that have produced the dirt from which everything grows.
[3] Okoyomon's first institutional solo exhibition mounted at the LUMA Westbau in Zurich in collaboration with The Serpentine Galleries in 2019, curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, continued the artist's exploration of history of the intersection of race and ideas about nature, light, life and death, and architecture.
The show, building upon gestures first made in Making Me Blush the previous year, presents a forest of the artist's lynching tree sculptures in the museum's Heimo Zobernig designed schwarzescafé space.
In an installation piece entitled "Frenzied Sun," Okoyomon created a machine that uses the gallery's air conditioning system to circulate cotton and cottonwood seeds through the space like snow.
Running for nine and a half minutes, the single channel video follows an animated bear smoking a blunt in the woods while a recording of the artist's brother recounting the times he was almost shot during encounters with the American police plays.
[20] The show's press release recounts how Kudzu was first imported to the American South in 1876 with the intention that when planted its roots would strengthen the ecosystem's soil which as result of the excessive over cultivation of cotton by chattel slaves during the period was threatened by wide spread erosion.
Okoyomon suggests that despite the fact that vine's "specific history as a failed remedy for the monumental toll slavery took on the ecological system of the American South has been largely forgotten," Kudzu might serve as a metaphor for Blackness itself, which like the plant, became monstrous when removed from its home in Africa and was taken to the states, where it functioned simultaneously as "indispensable to and irreconcilable with Western civilization."
"[1] Other critics have noted the influence of BDSM, theories of quantum entanglement, Donna Haraway's scholarship, queer experience, language poetry, and Okoyomon's Nigerian upbringing on the group's psychosexual cuisine.
[24] For the Fashion designer Telfar's autumn/winter 2020 show at Florence’s Pitti Uomo, models were sent down a circular runway that doubled as a dining table for a meal prepared and envisioned by Spiral Theory Test Kitchen.