Otto Neals

The Light of the World

2020

Otto Neals is an African-American painter and sculptor, originally from South Carolina, USA. When he was four years old, his family left the South and settled in Brooklyn, New York, where he still resides. All of Neals’s schooling was in Brooklyn, where he studied commercial art at George Westinghouse Vocational High School. He describes himself as a self-taught artist, although he studied briefly at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, with Isaac Soyer and printmaking, at the Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, with Krishna Reddy, Mohammed Khalil and Roberto DeLomanica. He was introduced to stone carving by sculptor, Vivian Schuyler Key, who presented him with his first set of stone carving tools. The Prospect Park Alliance and Ezra Jack Keats Foundation commissioned him, in 1995, to create a bronze sculpture, titled, Peter and Willie, based on the works of author and illustrator, Keats. For this work, which is located in the Imagination Playground, in Prospect Park, Mr. Neals was presented with the New York City Arts Commission’s Award for Excellence in Design. His artwork has been exhibited at the Columbia Museum of Art, the Huntsville Museum of Art, the Ghana National Museum, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and the collections of Congressman John Lewis, jazz musician Randy Weston, actor/singer Harry Bellafonte and Oprah Winfrey.