Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates is honoured to have facilitated the acquisition of seven figures from Precious Okoyomon’s Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid (2026) for an institutional collection. The acquisition brings a group of figures from one of the artist’s most compelling recent installations into a permanent public collection.
Presented at the 2026 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid comprises fifty-five suspended, angel-like creatures. Toys have long been part of Okoyomon’s vocabulary: the artist reworks stuffed animals into vessels for questions of race, innocence, and the subconscious. Here, each body is assembled from discarded children’s toys salvaged from thrift stores and joined to taxidermied bird wings. They hang from nooses, in reference to the history of racial violence in the United States. For the artist, these forms hold contradiction: they are marked by both death and eternal life, made for flight yet subject to gravity, and always burdened by grief. As Okoyomon notes, the figures “inhabit the uneasy threshold between object and subject, play and punishment, animation and death.”
Okoyomon’s practice moves across sculpture, installation, and poetry, examining the enduring effects of the historical construction of race on the natural world. Their work often brings human histories into contact with organic materials and processes, including growth, decay, and transformation. The resulting environments resist a separation between nature and culture, or between past violence and present conditions. In Okoyomon’s work, histories do not simply recede. They persist in bodies, materials, and landscapes, shaping how life unfolds.
Precious Okoyomon (1993– ) is a Nigerian-American poet and artist. They have had solo exhibitions at the LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland; the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Performance Space New York, New York; the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid Foundation, Madrid, Spain; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, New York; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. They were included in the Baltic Triennial 13, Tallinn, Estonia; the 58th Belgrade Biennial, Serbia; the 59th Venice Biennale, Italy; the 2022 Okayama Art Summit, Japan; the 11th Sequences Biennial, Reykjavik, Iceland; the 2023 Thailand Biennial, Chiang Rai, Thailand, as well as in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK; LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany; LUMA Arles, France; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Nigerian Pavillion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. Okoyomon’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, and LUMA Arles, France. Okoyomon was the 2021 recipient of the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award, as well as the 2021 Chanel Next Art Prize.
Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates negotiated and finalized this acquisition on behalf of a distinguished institutional collection.
Installation view, Precious Okoyomon, Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid, 2026, Whitney Biennial 2026, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA, 2026. ©️ Precious Okoyomon, courtesy the artist and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Ron Amstutz ©️ Whitney Museum of American Art.