FLORIAN OKWU







Florian Okwu is a craft-based artist documenting his own fictional culture through abstract sculpture. His creative work serves as the unifier between a whimsical, imaginative childhood and the purpose-driven, meaning-seeking quest of adult life. Through his pieces, whether a symbolic & playful creature or an intricate life-sized Being, he physically records the broadening understanding of his own humanity, as well as his attempts to answer the forever present questions relating to the meaning of beauty, craftings of a purposful life, and coming to terms with death & dying. Underlying each of these questions, he works from a foundation which rejects stagnation, based on the desire to master the materials he works with as well as the composition of delicate form, symmetry, and balance.

Florian believes that art treated with the right balance of care takes on a life of its own, exceeding the intentions of its creator to become the vehicles of anyone’s inner mythologies, as well as proofs of a passing life. These are what he seeks to make and spend his life refining: Objects which become alive, not through movement, sound, or material, but by the impregnation of a soul which will mature beyond that which was poured into them.

06/10/2025


Education:

Rhode Island School of Design
BFA Sculpture 2021-2024



Lycée International de Los Angeles
International Baccalaureate 2013-2018



Experience:

Independent Fine Artist
Self Employed - 06/2022 to Present


Woodshop & Coldshop Monitor
Rhode Island School of Design - 01/2023 to 06/2024


Resident Intern
Carving Studio & Sculpture Center - 06/2023 to 09/2023


Creative Director
TradeUp - 05/2022 to 11/2023


Design Consultant
Cultura Venray - 11/2019 to 12/2019