12-1PM Artist talk at Tala (1644 W Chicago Ave #1)

1-3PM Vinyl listening session at Good Funk (1604 W Chicago Ave)

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Join WBEZ and EarlyWork for an intimate artist talk with Lola Ayisha Ogbara at Tala art gallery in West Town. After learning about Lola’s practice and the works on view in her exhibition Marked, we’ll head across the street to Good Funk natural wine bar for a listening session featuring vinyl records curated by the artist. Join us as we sip and savor the beautiful intersections between fine art, music and natural wine–groovy vibes guaranteed! 
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Ticket purchase includes access to the artist talk and listening session, plus a glass of wine at Good Funk. Additional wine and bites available for purchase. 

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About Lola Ayisha Ogbara

Lola Ayisha Ogbara is a Nigerian American conceptual artist from Chicago, Illinois. She has earned a BA from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her practice explores the haptic sub/conscious, racialized voyeurism, and transcendental sonic experiments. Ogbara has exhibited in art spaces nationwide, including The Luminary, Kavi Gupta, Kemper Museum, Mindy Solomon Gallery, and Kristen Lorello Gallery. She has also received residencies, fellowships, and awards from Alfred University, Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago, the Coney Family Fund, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, and many more.

Ogbara is currently based in Chicago, Illinois.

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About Marked

Tala is proud to present Marked, the first solo exhibition in Chicago by Chicago-based artist Lola Ayisha Ogbara. Excavating the exhibition space’s latent potential as a site of rememory, Ogbara constructs an immersive environment of haunting and collective remembering. Through ceramic sculpture, sound, and scent, she engages the philosophical poetics of the scar as both a visual language of fugitivity and an imprint of resistance.

Drawing from the 19th-century folktale Tar Baby, as told in the Uncle Remus stories, Ogbara considers the tale as an allegory for the history of Black survival through subversive wit, where cunning and flight become strategies of endurance. Reflecting on these tactics of evasion as a dual narrative of movement and displacement, Ogbara’s newest body of work, Sticky, invokes the legacy of Afrocartography—from the Indigenous Lukala maps of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the woven routes embedded in braids and quilts throughout the African diaspora in America. As if leaving a trail of footsteps through the gallery, Ogbara creates her own semiotic map-making language to lead viewers through her own personal history while speculating a path forward. 

Accompanying the exhibition is a set of fragrances and candles by Amanda Harth. Grounded in scent’s powerful ability to heal and (re)member, Harth’s olfactory compositions are inspired by the histories of three once-thriving Black communities—now lost or submerged: Seneca Village, beneath Central Park (NY); Oscarville, now Lake Lanier (GA); and Kowaliga, now Lake Martin (AL). Drawing from the native flora and key industries that once sustained these places, Harth’s scents honor their legacies by immersing visitors in sensory portraits of each community at its height. Complementing these is a fourth fragrance, created specifically for the exhibition, designed to evoke a sense of grounding and support the making of new memories.

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