CORY REYONLDS | DATE 8/5/2025

The first major monograph on Kambui Olujimi

“The most radical thing you can do as a Black person in America is to be happy.” So begins the preface to Kambui Olujimi: North Star, releasing this week from Gregory R. Miller & Co. as a component of the rising Bed Stuy-born artist’s recent installation at San José Museum of Art and related symposium at Lincoln Center. Both a proper exhibition catalog and a deep investigation of the concept of Black boundlessness that has fascinated Olujimi since childhood, this 160-page hardcover includes 100 color reproductions alongside writings by Olujimi and Hanif Abdurraqib, an interview with the renowned late South African curator Koyo Kouoh and edited transcripts of Olujimi’s Conversations on Boundlessness symposium featuring Yasi Alipour, Naomi Beckwith, Nayland Blake, Louis Chude-Sokei, Amaryllis R. Flowers, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Arthur Jafa, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and J Wortham. “Your proposal is one of the most compelling, beautiful, poetic acts of displacement,” Kouoh asserts in their interview. “I love it because it breaks the assumptive logic around Blackness. It proposes powerful imaginative practices around worlding, and world-making. Your work is foundationally engaged in the tension between matter and non-matter.” Featured image is “Folding Mirrors” (2022).