Adebunmi Gbadebo joined the Museum of the African Diaspora for their virtual In the Artists Studio session on Wednesday, August 19th, 2020, to discuss her process, her career, and her upcoming projects. This talk is co-presented with the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Adebunmi Gbadebo is a visual artist who creates sculptures, paintings, prints, and paper using human hair sourced from people of the African diaspora. Rejecting traditional art materials, Gbadebo saw hair as a means to center her people and their histories as central to the narratives in her work. Born in New Jersey and based in Newark, Gbadebo first gained recognition in 2015 exhibiting in her first solo exhibition at the Paul Robeson Gallery at Rutgers University, Newark, NJ while earning a BFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY. Her exhibitions include Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (London), Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis), Untitled Art Fair (Miami), Chashama, Miranda Kuo Gallery, The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center (New York), Morris Art Dodge Foundation, College of Saint Elizabeth New Jersey), amongst others. She is in the permanent collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Minnesota Museum of American Art and has been written about in publications such as the New York Times, Huffington Post, The Sydney Morning Herald, Artspace, Ocula, and Afropunk. Gbadebo’s residencies include Vermont Studio Center, Keating Foundry, and in 2017 she gave a talk at the Newark Museum speaking on the connections between Mickalene Thomas’ Documentary “Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman: A Portrait of my Mother” and how her own mother has influenced her work professionally and personally.
