Chris Ofili's twelve Othello prints are presented in conjunction with Such Sweet Thunder—Columbia’s year-long festival of concerts, dramatic presentations, and lectures centering on Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s Shakespeare-inspired jazz suite. In these etchings, Ofili represents one of Shakespeare’s most complexly moving figures while challenging viewers to see in Othello: The Moor of Venice aspects of the profound tragedies, racial and otherwise, that plague the world today.
