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Omari Odom remembers watching old, black and white Mickey Mouse cartoons as a child.

“I said in my mind, ‘I want to do that,’” he said. “From that moment forward, I just started drawing and drawing.”

Odom, a Syracuse University senior studying animation and a student in the InclusiveU program, started drawing characters, including some of his favorite superheroes like Spider-Man.

An exhibit of Odom’s work featuring drawings of Harry Potter, Power Rangers, Black Panther and other characters is on display in the Sharon H. Jacquet Education Commons in SU’s School of Education. Presented by Light Work and the Lawrence B. Taishoff Center for Inclusive Higher Education, the “Desires and Harmony: Paintings and Drawings by Omari Odom” exhibition began on Oct. 30 and will remain on display for the rest of the semester and probably into the spring.

Seeing his work displayed in Huntington Hall at the university was “a surreal moment” for him, Odom said.

Brianna Shults, the internship and employment coordinator for the Taishoff Center, reached out to Mary Lee Hodgens, the associate director at Light Work, to coordinate a potential internship for Odom. Light Work wanted to support Odom and his work, and the exhibit is part of his internship.

“With our limitations with the virus, we thought, ‘OK, we’ve got this talented person. And what can we do to support an artist?’” Hodgens said.

Light Work decided to support Odom in one of the ways that the gallery has always supported artists — through an exhibition. Odom worked with Hodgens to prepare and install the exhibition.

After Odom and Light Work selected which pieces of art to include in the exhibit, Light Work scanned the images and printed them out on adhesive Photo Tex material. Odom and Hodgens then went to the space in the School of Education to determine the placement of each piece on the walls.

While a reception was not possible due to COVID-19, Odom and Hodgens planned to hold a “Drawing with Omari” workshop at the School of Education with a limited number of attendees. But due to rising COVID-19 cases on campus, Odom and Hodgens had to postpone the workshop and instead hope to hold it in the spring.

Odom said each of the pieces take about two hours to create. He focuses on making sure that the lines in the drawings are accurate, sometimes going back to redraw if the lines do not meet his standards.

“I just sit down and just draw it,” Odom said. “And every character that I sometimes think about or that I think about just comes to my mind. I just draw.”

Odom’s art is presented by Light Work and the Lawrence B. Taishoff Center for Inclusive Higher Education. Emily Steinberger | Photo Editor

He also strives to make the characters look as if they were alive, rather than just images.

Odom takes inspiration from pop artists Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as Pablo Picasso. Haring and Lichtenstein’s work features bold, thick lines that are reflected in Odom’s work.

“He does have a lively line quality in his drawing — a real confident, kind of bold line that he uses in all of his drawings that I really love,” Hodgens said.

As a ‘90s kid, Odom also incorporates characters from this decade into his work. Odom likes many of the current Disney movies, but he wants to remind people not to forget about the originals.

For Omari, the goal of the exhibition is to show who he is and what he’s about. His older brother Marcus Odom said he sees Omari’s personality through his art. Omari has the “gift” of retaining the likenesses of characters and then capturing them through his art, Marcus said.

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“It was like he had a way of capturing those images and … with the contour lines, to a quality where it’s like, ‘You didn’t just sit there and draw that,’” Marcus said. “And I’m just like, ‘Where’d you get these images from?’”

One piece in the exhibit that stands out to Marcus features Harry Potter and other characters from the Harry Potter movie series, including Hermione Granger and Severus Snape.

Omari started drawing the pieces around his junior year of high school, and his work has been evolving since then.

“There’s way more stuff that Marcus hasn’t seen yet or nobody else has seen yet that’ll probably blow you away,” Omari said.

Published on November 18, 2020 at 10:46 pm

Contact Mandy: ackrayna@syr.edu | @MandyKraynak