Adebunmi Gbadebo: in Conversation with Ashara Ekundayo

Adebunmi Gbadebo’s practice engages with the histories embedded in land, material, and matter, using her work as a form of living archive. In this Woodward Lecture Series conversation with curator Ashara Ekundayo, she will explore how uncovering these traces allows her to connect with memory, ancestry, and the stories carried within the land itself. This conversation is presented in partnership with Artist As First Responder.

Location: Wendell W. Anderson Auditorium; Walter B. Ford II Building; College for Creative Studies Ford Campus; 201 E. Kirby St, Detroit, MI, 48202.

Free parking available in CCS Brush Street lot (on Brush just north of Fredericks).

Adebunmi Gbadebo:

Adebunmi Gbadebo (Ah-dae-bu-mee Bha-dae-bo) lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gbadebo earned a BFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a certification in Creative Place Keeping at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She was an Artist in Residence at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia (2021-2025) and has also been a Maxwell and Hanrahan Fellow (2023) and a Pew Fellow (2022). Gbadebo was a Keynote speaker for the American Ceramic Circle annual conference (2023) and has given talks at various educational and cultural institutions including the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Newark Museum of Art. She served as the Community Engagement Apprentice to Architect Nina Cooke John for the Harriet Tubman Monument in Newark, New Jersey, to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus, and is currently working with students and faculty at Clemson University to create a sculpture that honors Black and enslaved laborers.

Grounded in historically and culturally significant materials such as indigo dye, human hair collected throughout the African diaspora and soil hand-dug from the True Blue plantation grounds in South Carolina, Gbadebo’s practice is an exploration of heritage. Her use of such materials centers her family history of enslavement in the American South, while her ceramics draw inspiration from traditional African pottery techniques, calling on her Nigerian ancestry. Fueled by research and a commitment to the archival record, Gbadebo’s multidisciplinary approach investigates the complex relationships between land, matter, and memory.

Solo exhibitions include Watch Out for the Ghosts, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2025); Adebunmi Gbadebo: Remains, Claire Oliver Gallery, New York (2023) and Uprooted, New Jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ (2020). Group exhibitions include Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition, The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK (2025); Ten Thousand Suns, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Artspace, AU (2024); Blues People, curated by Alliyah Allen, Express Newark, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ (2024); Songs for Ritual and Remembrance, Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, PA (2023) and Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022). Gbadebo’s work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Montclair Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Newark Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the South Carolina State Museum, Wake Forest University and the Weisman Art Museum.

Ashara Ekundayo:

Ashara Ekundayo is a Black feminist interdisciplinary independent curator of contemporary art, visual maker, cultural theologian, public archivist, and consultant whose creative cartography practice is rooted in joy-informed pedagogies and the study, creation, and maintenance of Black archives. In the tradition of critical artistic action and dynamic imagination, she also conjures collaborative site-responsive ceremony and utilizes artist-based strategies such as photography, screenprinting, zine-making, installation, and altar-making to illuminate the specific expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora. Most recently, she has amplified her long standing engagement with Black artists, curators, and cultural workers living and making on the African continent.
Her work explores healing, memory, space, and place, and she is the Founder and Executive Creative Director of the US-based platform Artist As First Responder (AAFR) dedicated to sustaining sacred sites for imagination, investigation, and rest by championing artists whose practices heal communities and save lives. Through public forums, residencies, community-based archives, and exhibitions, AAFR programs utilize the principles of Afrofuturism, Black Memory, and Collective Liberation as worldbuilding materials to foreground creative inquiry and research praxis that connects people across genre and geography. Additionally, she is the Founder and Principal at AECreative Consulting Partners, LLC where she places artists and cultural production as essential in equitable design practices, real estate development, and movement building.
Ashara’s prior brick and mortar venues include Omi Arts at Impact Hub Oakland (2012-2017) and Ashara Ekundayo Gallery (2017-2019), both in Oakland, CA. She has participated in a wide range of national and international artist and curatorial residencies. Ashara currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music and the Board of Directors for the Black Art Library in Detroit, and recently co-curated the 18 month travelling exhibition “Frontline Prophet: James Baldwin”, featuring works by Sabrina Nelson, which completed its tour at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American Art & History in Detroit. She is presently piloting a new “archival projection site” linking her Detroit, MI home with creative hubs across the Black Atlantic and African Diaspora.

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