portrait of the artist
“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it”
Ernst Fischer. The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach.
Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo (b. Burlingame, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of assemblage, painting, and sculpture. She draws from the visual impulses of folk objects, protest art, shanty structures, non-canonized Afro-diasporic practices, and the lineage of painting, to create devotional and disobedient objects. Her work includes a combination of painted elements and found materials. Seeking to both situate and oppose our current material conditions, the painted imagery predominantly references scenes from online media. This re-presentation of circulated images is an attempt to intercept the passivity of our role as witnesses, particularly as it relates to the violence inherent to capitalism and imperialism. Her practice, then, becomes a lexicon of painted moments, working against the strategies of liberal media and corporate algorithms.
The sculptural aspects of the work–which take on the cloak of the paintings–are fashioned out of found and discarded material that the artist predominantly collects from dumpsters and the roadside. With this gesture, Adeyemo engages with Afro-diasporic folk traditions, blurring the line between the animate and inanimate, and affirming the ability of objects to embody what cannot be seen. Her practice is, in many ways, influenced by her late father: the material remnants of his life, and the vacancy that persists in the wake of his death. In sorting through his many inventions, she recognized a Black fugitive logic. Black fugitivity, as described by Tina Campt, “highlights the tension between the acts or flights of escape and creative practices of refusal, nimble and strategic practices that undermine the category of the dominant.” Adeyemo considers her own practice to engage in this lineage of material maneuvers born of scarcity, urgency, and strategy—working in opposition to extractive systems and driven by a desire to assemble meaning out of what is considered broken. A dual grief acts as a conduit for the joining of the painted and the sculptural: both personal grief and the experience of mourning people you’ve never met—lives vanished to a system of violence larger than any one person. Understanding grief as a site of radicalization, Adeyemo’s work attempts to transform our individualized mourning into a collective force of resistance.
Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at Marianne Boesky Gallery, c1760 Gallery, Picture Theory Gallery, BRIC Arts Media, The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Muskegon Museum of Art and has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Art Cube, and “Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen”. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at BRIC Arts Media, Lazuli Residency, and the New York Academy of Art. Adeyemo was the 2024 recipient of The Real Art Award, and a finalist of the 2021 Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters