Tributes roll in following the death of Columbus artist Keturah Bobo

Overnight, tributes began rolling in for the Columbus artist Keturah Bobo, whose family posted to social media on Thursday about her death following a battle with a long-term illness.

“To those who really knew her, Keturah was a deeply private soul,” the family wrote. “We ask that you honor her memory in the ways she loved most – through art, music, color, and human connection.”

On Facebook, the producer and musician Rashad Thomas, for whom Bobo illustrated multiple album covers, praised the artist for sharing her gifts with the world, writing that “the work [she] did will live on forever.”

This is particularly true of the children’s books Bobo illustrated beginning with I Am Enough in 2018, all of which depict the Black characters that the artist rarely saw on bookshelves growing up, and that she wanted her own children to be able to experience. “I want to make sure my son sees characters that represent who he is or who he could potentially be,” Bobo said in an April 2024 interview with Matter News. “And you don’t realize how important that idea is unless you don’t have it.”

These ideas are further cemented in the forthcoming My Brown Boy, due in 2026, which Bobo illustrated, and which she said expands on the themes of representation and empowerment that ripple throughout her entire body of work. “The kids specifically attracted to that book need that book,” she said. “It’s about feeling represented and seeing yourself and recognizing, ‘I can be this. I can be an author. I can be an illustrator.’ … My intention is always going to be to represent the misrepresented and the underrepresented. That’s what it was back then, and that’s what it still is now.”

From an early age, Bobo exhibited both a talent for art and a deeply ingrained sense of curiosity, which led her to seek out additional information about a range of subjects. Learning about this history of slavery in elementary school, for instance, the details were so often generalized that she would bolster her lessons with trips to the library, absorbing texts of diaries kept by enslaved people. 

“I would go and seek out those books, even as a kid at age 12 or 13, because I was curious what it was really like for them,” said Bobo, whose interests were further stoked by being raised around grandparents who came of age in the Jim Crow South. “I always had a curiosity for those things that were in my ancestral path.”

In the social media post announcing her death, the Bobo family noted that a deep love of family existed “at the core of everything Keturah created” – a trait that manifested itself during our interview last year, which the artist conducted as her young children crawled all over her throughout as though she were a human jungle gym. “She drew strength and inspiration from her closest relationships,” the family wrote, “and cherished every moment shared with her loved ones.”

Details about a celebration of life will be shared by the family in the coming weeks.