Onli is a creative artist whose career has touched upon a variety of disciplines in fine and applied visual art. He has been an art therapist, educator, and illustrator. He has also distinguished himself in painting, drawing, illustration, publishing, fashion, and multimedia production. This includes an extensive exhibition and publication record.  He is known for having coined the term Rhythmistic in the 1970s to interpret his stylizations which fuse primitive and futuristic concepts.

Rhythmism was effectively manifested with several solo exhibitions at Chicago’s innovative Younger Gallery during that prolific period. 

Onli earned a BFA and MAAT from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago which included studies in Paris France at the Sorbonne and Centre Pompidou.  He has worked in the collections of The Cool Globes Public Art Exhibition, The Chicago Children’s Museum, The DuSable Museum, The Johnson Publishing Company. Plus, the estates of Mile Davis and Alice Coltrane, along with freelancing illustrations for the Rolling Stones, McDonald’s, Motown, MODE Avant Garde Magazine, the Paris Metro Magazine, Capital Records, and Holt, Rinehart, &Winston to name a few.

He has exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Science and Industry, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Krannert Museum, The Tubman Museum, along with the elegant Corvus Gallery of the stately Gordon Parks Arts Hall of the University of Chicago.