OmololaOyetubo
Known as Lo — Founder, House of Oye
House of Oye is the practice of Omolola Oyetubo — a self-taught spatial designer, social architect, and cultural steward whose work sits at the intersection of immersive design, material culture, and the living traditions of the African diaspora. In her own words:
This practice did not emerge from a curriculum. It emerged from a body.
I am a Black woman, first-generation American, and firstborn child of two immigrants — born to a Yoruba father and a Jamaican mother, raised in the American Midwest. I am a self-taught spatial designer, social architect, and cultural steward. These are not separate identities. They are a single inheritance, and House of Oye is what I have built from it.
I carry two lineages that shape this practice in distinct and complementary ways. My Yoruba heritage offers a direct line back to named traditions and living cosmologies. My Jamaican heritage offers something equally profound but differently expressed — roots carried forward in spirit, in practice, and in sound, whose stories were severed from their named origins but never erased. Both inform how I move through a room, how I place an object, and what I believe a space is capable of doing to the people inside it.
I build fourth spaces for third-culture people — environments where a Makonde lipiko and a mid-century modern chair occupy the same room as equals, where the furniture holds the weight of two continents at once, and where every object is chosen for what it carries rather than how it looks.
My exhibitions — The Living Room, The Mask and The Remembering, and Two Artists One Home — build environments where ancestral intelligence is made structurally present. Audiences arrive with the entirety of who they are and leave not having witnessed art, but having been initiated by it.
What I have built in immersive space I am now moving into material form — furniture and homeware that carries Afro-diasporic design logic in proportion, material, function, and spirit, developed in direct collaboration with heritage artisans on the continent. Not to borrow from their knowledge. To work alongside it.
This is my interpretation of Afro-Nowism — a recovery of what was lost and a construction of what is needed now, built from the tools and philosophies of yesterday for the people of the present.
I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan and am based in Tucson, Arizona.
"I build fourth spaces for third-culture people."
— Omolola OyetuboThe Materials
The materials at the center of this practice are ancestral African artifacts — furniture, textiles, pottery, sculptural and spiritual objects — sourced through ongoing relationships with African art dealers and cultural stewards connected to the artisans still making them. I do not acquire objects to use them. I enter into relationship with them, and that relationship is the foundation every space is built on.
The Intention
House of Oye exists at the intersection of spatial design, cultural stewardship, and lived diasporic experience. Every environment is built to hold what most institutions have never been equipped to honor — the full weight, meaning, and living presence of African and diasporic material culture.