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Black Renaissance: 20 Game Changers Under 30

abs list toyinWho: Toyin Odutola, 28

Nigerian-born artist Toyin Odutola began drawing at age 9 as a way to escape her reality. She told Vogue Italia in 2011, “I moved around a lot when I was a child, two of the houses I grew up in have totally disappeared. One was burnt in a riot, and the other was pulled down. I needed to create something I could take with me wherever I went.”

Odutola received Bachelor of Arts in studio art and communications from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and later a Master’s of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in 2012.

She has had a one-woman show at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, and exhibited in group shows at the Menil Collection in Houston and at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Shainman describes her work as “detailed and almost obsessive but beyond the appearance of the work, the artist is making firm declarations.”

The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. and the Honolulu Museum of Art are among the public collections holding works by Odutola.

“I kept wanting to push my image as validity, I wanted to see my portrait on a wall and know it was okay.”

abs list kimberlyWho: Kimberly Hogg, 26

Kimberly Hogg joined Pepsi in 2009 in brand innovation, where she worked on its short term beverage strategy. She has moved on to brand management for Pepsi’s AMP Energy, which generates over $250 million in revenue. She’s responsible for analytics and scorecarding, developing retail programming, managing the brand’s social presence online, creating e-mail distributions, and keeping her team abreast of how the brand is performing.

According to Black Enterprise:

“Hogg became a brand manager at Pepsi without any professional marketing experience and without having majored in marketing in college. She’d been an economics major and spent a year and a half at Citigroup before deciding to go after a marketing position. She had only participated in a marketing challenge in college for fun, but that brief experience was enough to make her realize her professional passion.”

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