What's in a name?

By Yvette Miller, Founder, Ocoboa

Ocoboa began with a colour.

While looking at Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s Lampblack series, I became fascinated by the depth of the black pigment and the freedom in the way she worked.

That led me to the hex code #0C0B0A — an almost-black tone.

Read aloud, it became Ocoboa.

But the name came to represent more than a colour. O’Neal made abstraction on her own terms, at a time when there were strong expectations around what Black artists should make and how their work should look.

She made her own rules.

That spirit sits at the heart of Ocoboa today: a space for artists who follow their own visual language, experiment freely and refuse to be boxed in.

#0C0B0A. A colour, a reference, and the beginning of something bigger.