Tactile Truth Telling: A Conversation on Memory & Material
Thursday, November 10, 2022 | 6–7:15pm
This is a free event | Click here for recording of event
On the occasion of SALT to CATCH GHOSTS, curated by Ashara Ekundayo, we invite you to join artists April Bey, Ashara Ekundayo, and Adebunmi Gbadebo in a conversation facilitated by AAFR Curatorial Assistant and founder of the Black Freedom Fellowship Isha Rosemond, as they explore the relationship between tactile material and the practice of storytelling across the African Diaspora.
A big thank you to Chef Bryant Terry and 4Color Books for making this event possible through generous financial support.
April Bey grew up in The Bahamas (New Providence) and lives in Los Angeles, CA. She is a visual artist and art educator, whose interdisciplinary work is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism, and constructs of race within supremacist systems. Her work has been exhibited internationally and in seven solo exhibitions to date and is in the collections of the California African American Museum, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, and more. Bey is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College and represented by TERN Gallery, The Bahamas and Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles.
Adebunmi Gbadebo is a New Jersey-born and Philadelphia-based artist whose work centers on deeply resonant materials such as indigo, human hair, and clay hand dug from plantations. Her practice tends to the stories of ancestors, families, and individuals either long overlooked or too-closely surveilled. Gbadebo earned her BFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY. Her work is currently being shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and is included in the permanent collection 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.
Ashara Ekundayo is a queer Black feminist interdisciplinary independent curator, visual maker, cultural theologian, arts organizer, and strategist whose creative practice is rooted in joy-informed pedagogies and the study and creation of Black archives, site-responsive ceremony, and the specific expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora. She is the founder of the philanthropic organization Artist As First Responder and has collaborated with artists and institutions including the Museum of the African Diaspora, SFMOMA, and Black [Space] Residency. Ashara currently lives and works between the San Francisco Bay Area and her hometown of Detroit, MI.
Isha Rosemond is an Ayitian-American postdisciplinary artist whose works use somatic poetry to explore the distance between colonial documentation and African Diasporic truth-telling. Isha is the founder of the Black Freedom Fellowship, an international rest residency that offers resources for BIPOC artists/activists to create vital futures. They are a 2022 Curator-in-Residence at SOMArts San Francisco, 2022 Artist-in-Residence at Mirante Xique Xique in Bahia, Brazil, and a 2021 California Artist Council Individual Artist Fellow.