WHO KNOWS TOMORROW?

3 min readApr 2, 2025

Ozioma Onuzulike

This poet, this ceramic artist Ozioma Onuzulike is reciting his poems as he strides around the gallery, where guests are seated. He glows with a certain inner light. He sings In English but it has the rhythm of a foreign tongue. I struggle to catch the words that I know, — mother, mother –I hear the word mother. His poetry is musical and compelling. He is smiling, dressed in a colorful shirt, tall and proud at this joint poetry reading with Marc Straus, the owner of Marc Straus Gallery at 57 Walker Street at the Tribeca exhibit of his ceramic sculpture. Straus, a former doctor, alternates reading his poems with Onuzulike’s. Straus’s collection Not God reflects his professional life as an oncologist, a doctor often dealing with terminally ill patients, who were struggling to live; Straus is a man who writes about life and death.

Onuzulike’s poetry, comes from a different place. “It is fed by his environment, by Africa, by his history as a small child,” He comes from a family of nine children and his mother figures prominently in his poems. One of his siblings was lost “to the hands of Death” and “there was lots of trauma. “I sing a song of faith and joy and the scars are often healed in my art,” he says.

On the walls around us are Onuzulike’s exhibit, “Who Knows Tomorrow” — beautifully designed wall hangings of beads, glass, seeds, and palm kernels — some natural and some clay fabricated — “once a symbol of subjugation, these beads have emerged as markers of wealth and status.” This artist reclaims them from their past, drawing inspiration from the textiles of Kente.

Onye ma echi, Who Knows Tomorrow? This is an Igbo proverb which prevails throughout his work. It speaks to the unpredictability of history, identity, and transformation. It speaks to the unknown of life. The artist uses ceramics, often thousands of small circular pieces with different glazes, wired together to form mystical fabrics. In Royal Alkyabba (2024), a kind of cloak that signifies authority, there are 35,000 ceramic and natural palm kernel shell beads joined with copper wire formed into a piece that is 189 x179 7/8 x 5 7/8 in. In Flamboyant Armour for Femifalana1 (lace series) 2025, there is earthenware and stoneware clays, glazes, and copper wire, 65 5/8 by 58 5.8 by 5 7/8. Many of the works in the exhibit took more than four months, with assistants, to complete.

“I try to show that something that has no value like beads can be transformed into something prestigious,” he says.

Not only a ceramics artist, poet, art critic and scholar of West African art and design history, Onuzulike is also an academic, a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Nigeria, in Nsukka. He lives and works in Enugu State, Nigeria. This is his second solo exhibition at the Marc Straus Gallery in New York.