Prof. ONli is taking bids on this rare statue. Email your interest at multiglobe@aol.com

 

 CHICAGO- Smart collectors are seeing early original limited-edition comics and 'zines from ONLI STUDIOS showing up on Ebay.at increasing price points recently. Specializing in limited edition publications, the rarity and innovative nature of these items are motivating and appealing factors to these astute speculators. 

 Mainstream publishers often produce hundreds of thousands of publications in an edition diluting the collection pool.. Whereas the svelte focus of ONLI STUDIOS is more like the tradition of studio-print-makers, in that it produces limited editions. With reprints being modified so that each edition or series is unique.

 https://libguides.sdsu.edu/comicsbytopic/afrofuturism

The above is a link to the Afrofuturist Comics Collection at the San Diego State University Library.  A tremendous resource.

 https://www.instagram.com/p/CTaEYPNLIsB/

The above is a link to a rare time lapse video of Prof. Onli painting in public at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2021. Here he does his Rhythmistic Future-Primitif thing in depicting the classic image of NOG: The Nubian of Greatness.  

 

“On Rhythmistic Art”

A Future-Primitif Approach to Visual Art.

All images and art are Copyright 2023 Turtel Onli and other dates.

They may not be remixed or reproduced for commercial purposes

without a written agreement with Dr.Turtel Onli, M.A.A.T.

 

“The art of Turtel Onli is African Centered. Many who have seen it appear to be confused by it. The culture conscious African Americans find it unacceptable because it does not bespeak the “traditional” Africa that they have come to know and love.  The middle-class find it difficult to accept because it is too African and not like what they have been told is “good art”.  Most Rhythm & Blues...... Hip-Hoppin’ Black Americans do not know about him or his work.

“Miles Plays Miles”. Actual proposed album cover illustration. From a private collection. Circa 1975

 

As I stated earlier, his work is African-Centered. He has termed his style Rhythmism.  He coined the term in 1975 when he created an illustration for the legendary musician, Miles Davis, and rightly so.  The paintings, wearable art, Graphic Novels. illustrations and performances he creates are alive with RHYTHM.

 

    

 

 

 

 His work is demonstrative in its force.  The colors appear to dance before you.  The eyes, the lips, the styles of hair pull you, cajole you, take you in.

 

“The Rhythmistic Button-Head Bench” Chicago Childrens Museum permanent collection.

“Bench Mark Functional Artworks”, circa 1995. Navy Pier Chicago.

 

Detail of “The Naga Momas”. Oils on wooden panels. Circa 2022

 

Untitled creative discharge: Colored pencils. Circa 2016.

 

The colors are bright, vibrant, steamy as they vaporize into a thin layer of white heat and back the vibrantly charged colors.  The colors dare you to laugh, to play, to join in the high energy of life.  Life on a higher plane. Life in a new Africa, a futuristic Africa with a neo-tradition that does not deny itself but digs down into itself to bare yet a new fruit for the future.  This future fruit, a Rhythmistic one, is an universal fruit to embellish the entire fabric of humanity.

 

“Chili Tongue”, watercolors. Circa 1998.

 

Universal is mentioned because the reference to Onli’s work being African Centered and not generally accepted in that community is due to its power and influence being misunderstood.  There is another community into which Onli has yet to be accepted and that is the mainstream Art Community.

 

Hype from the “Rhythmistic Smorgasbord Exhibition” courtesy of the Box Factory For the Arts, St. Joseph, Michigan. Featuring selected works from Onli’s “Passion Fruit” and “No Evils” Rhythmisitc visual art series.

 

Onli is representative of a new age, a forward-thinking age. An age that has a vision of an Africanization of the future by an Africa that is viable in the world scheme of things.  And a world unified by its universal values.

Hype from the 2021 Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago’s blockbu

ster group exhibition and the solo exhibition at stately Gordon Parks Hall’s Corvus Gallery of the University of Chicago, both featuring Onli’s Rhythmistic Future-Primitif visual art.

 

The classic disparities between Blacks and Whites and specifically between White and Black males stumbles blindly over into the Art World.  The continuance of this practice inhibits the flow of contributions by Black artists, creating voids of sterility.  This disparity curtails the universals that we as a culture look for in the world of innovative artists like Onli. 

 

“NOG Banking”. Acrylics on Linen. Circa 2015. The NOG Nu series.

 

The works of artists like Turtel Onli must be endeared, appropriately reviewed and appreciated because their universals will rhythmically pull at the ancestral memories that continue to make us human.  We can no longer afford the limitations of Euro-Centric Art as the only contemporary modernistic approach to unleash the potential power of Art.  Onli and his Rhythmistic Future-Primitif movement give the art critics, patrons, curators and makes the opportunity to expand their concept of the universal.”

 

1989: Marcia Hicks, PhD.