2023 Award in Craft - Adebunmi Gbadebo
Photo by David Orrell aka Negrowth; Courtesy of the artist.
Adebunmi Gbadebo
she/her | Philadelphia, PA | Multi-media artist
adebunmi.carbonmade.com | @adebooms
About the Artist
Adebunmi Gbadebo is a multimedia artist who uses culturally and historically imbued materials to investigate the complexities between land, matter, and memory on various sites of slavery. Centering on deeply resonant materials like indigo dye, soil hand dug from plantations, and human Black hair collected throughout the diaspora. The resulting works tend to carry the stories of ancestors, families, and individuals either long overlooked or too closely surveilled. Born in New Jersey and based between Newark and Philadelphia, Gbadebo earned her BFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY.
Adebunmi's work is included in the exhibition, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY and is currently at MFA Boston. She is currently a 2022 Pew Fellow and Artist in Residence at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia. Gbadebo has been written about in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Hypebeast, Brooklyn Rail, Forbes, and the American Craft Council magazine. She has given talks at the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, and the Newark Museum of Art and many universities.
Gbadebo’s works are included in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the South Carolina State Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Newark Museum of Art, amongst others. Gbadebo has presented in exhibitions across the US and internationally in Asia and Europe.
About the Work
My entire practice is steeped in the exploration of materials that are connected to the plantation where my family was enslaved as well as sites of slavery throughout the country. I am most interested in the memory that lays dormant in these materials and how this memory could be accessed.
For me as an artists, using materials that connect me to my own ancestry is my act of stewardship. Visiting the land of my enslaved ancestor, using the very land where their bodies have decomposed back into as material, using the rice and cotton they forcibly grew, using the indigo techniques that they brought over with them from Africa in my own contemporary practice are all ways I remember, care for, give reverence to, and preserve, their lives and memory.
My practice lays at the intersection of craft, anthropology, archeology, and history. In my series where I dig soil from sites of slavery and transform the land into ceramic sculpture is probably the greatest example of these intersections. Not only do I consult with practicers of these various fields for my own research and guidance on how to observe these historical sites but the act of digging up history and using the land to better understand it, archive it, further protect it all inhabit these fields.
Adebunmi Gdabebo, Blues People, 2020, human hair, cotton, dye, indigo, silk screen, 12' by 12', False Flags Gallery, Photo by False Flag Gallery
Adebunmi Gdabebo, Remains ceramics (install shot), 2023, soil from True Blue Plantation, SC, human hair, Carolina Gold rice, varies, Install shot at Claire Oliver Gallery, 10 x 30 in (lxh)
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The Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation Awards in Craft recognizes practitioners committed to material mastery and exploration with practices encompassing the stewardship of living cultural traditions, unique insight in material study, and the advancement of craft at the intersection of other fields including science.
