Adebunmi Gbadebo

“With my use of the land and body as material I am asserting literal Black bodies and Black spaces within an artistic canon that historically denies our influence.” 

Gbadebo’s (she/her) multimedia practice surfaces the often overlooked lives, creativity, labor, and oppression of people who were enslaved in the American South. She works with materials that carry cultural significance and memory, such as indigo dye, rice, cotton, and red earth hand-dug from a plantation where her ancestors once toiled and are currently buried. With the red earth, for example, Gbadebo explains that she used a traditional West African coil technique to create a series of funeral vessels as “a restoration of the land into a form that commemorates the history of my family line and activates the land.” Her work is included in in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, among others. In 2022, her work was included in the exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and a certification in creative place keeping from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.