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 languages of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices, folk and ritual objects, protest art, shanty structures, makeshift and make-do tactics, and the history of painting to create devotional and disobedient objects.
Her work includes a combination of painted elements and found materials. The images referenced in her paintings are sourced from digital media and archives. They depict symbolic and resonant moments, while grappling with the complexities of disenfranchisement, algorithms, resistance, education, protest, history, present, and future. This re-presentation of circulated images is an attempt to disrupt the passivity of our role as witnesses.
The sculptural aspects of her work are fashioned out of found materials, collected from dumpsters and sidewalks. With this gesture, Adeyemo challenges notions of “value,” while engaging in Afro-diasporic folk traditions–particularly posthumous practices like memory jugs and burial sites, which regard fragmented objects as intermediaries between the living and the dead.
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. Because of him, she is driven by a desire to assemble meaning out of what is considered broken. Understanding grief as a site of radicalization, her work attempts to transform our individualized mourning into a collective force of resistance.
Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo is a 2025-2026 NXTHVN Studio Art Fellow. She 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. Adeyemo was a 2021 BRIClab Contemporary Arts Resident and has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Art Cube, and “Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen”. Select exhibitions include Marianne Boesky Gallery, BRIC, c1760 Gallery, Picture Theory Gallery, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Muskegon Museum of Art.