ABOUT OSAZE AKIL

Osaze Akil Stigler is a Brooklyn-based contemporary artist and experiential creative director whose practice explores Black autonomy across the body, the built environment, and imagined worlds. Through figurative painting, spatial interventions, and increasingly sculptural forms, his work considers how power, protection, beauty, and belonging are constructed—and what becomes possible when Black subjects are given complete authority over themselves and the spaces they inhabit.

Drawing from history, architecture, fashion, and speculative worldbuilding, he creates images that move between the familiar and the fantastical. Monumental figures, domestic interiors, landscapes, and architectural forms become sites for examining ownership, inheritance, refuge, and self-determination. Rather than simply imagining Black subjects within existing systems, his work often proposes new ones: environments governed by their own logic, where beauty and adornment become expressions of autonomy and space itself can function as both sanctuary and declaration.

Osaze’s work has been featured in Vogue Arabia, CR Fashion Book, Blavity, and Beyoncé’s Black Parade Route. His work has been exhibited in New York City and Los Angeles and is held in the permanent collection of the Orange County Museum of Art, as well as private collections.

Alongside his studio practice, Osaze works as an experiential creative director and spatial designer. His background in landscape architecture informs an ongoing fascination with constructed space and its ability to shape identity, behavior, and collective experience. Across both disciplines, he approaches space as more than a backdrop: it is an active participant in storytelling, capable of communicating who belongs, who holds power, and what kinds of futures can be imagined.