Adebunmi Gbadebo

Adebunmi Gbadebo (Ah-dae-bu-mee Bha-dae-bo) lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gbadebo earned her BFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a certification in Creative Place Keeping at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Gbadebo is a multimedia artist who uses culturally and historically imbued materials to investigate the complex relationships between land, matter, and memory on sites of slavery. Using materials like indigo dye, soil hand-dug from plantation grounds, and Black hair collected throughout the diaspora, Gbadebo has formed a visual vocabulary entirely her own. Her works are heritage, centering ancestral stories that have a right to be told. 

She has been a Maxwell and Hanrahan Fellow (2023), a Pew Fellow (2022), and is a current Artist in Residence at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia. She was the 2023 Keynote speaker for the American Ceramic Circle annual conference, and has given talks at various education and cultural institutions including the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Barnard College, and the Newark Mueum of Art. She served as the Community Apprentice to architect Nina Cooke John for the Harriet Tubman monument in Newark, NJ to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus. Gbadebo is currently working with students and faculty at Clemson University to create a sculpture that honors the 667 Black and enslaved laborers who transformed Fort Hill Plantation into Clemson University, and whose unmarked burials were recently identified on the campus grounds.

Recent solo exhibitions include Adebunmi Gbadebo: Remains, Claire Oliver Gallery, New York (2023) and Uprooted, New Jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ (2020).  Selected group exhibitions include Ten Thousand Suns, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Artspace, AU (2024); Blues People, curated by Alliyah Allen, Express Newark, Rutgers University, Newark, NK (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). Public collections include the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the South Carolina State Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Newark Museum of Art.