Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by Real Art Award winner Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo

Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo (b. 1999 in Burlingame, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist creating liberatory visions. Both historical liberation struggles and current resistance movements are central to how Adeyemo constructs the scenes in her work. At the intersection of assemblage, painting, and sculpture, Adeyemo pulls from the visual sensibilities of graffiti, protest art, Cuban solidarity posters, hand-drawn shop signs, and non-canonized African-diasporic storytelling sensibilities (so-called “naive” art) as a means of contributing to a lineage of opposition. Adeyemo’s work includes a trash foraging practice, where she collects found and discarded objects from the street. She considers them to be “rejected by-products of a capitalist use-value structure,” and regards them animistically. They exist not only as found objects, but as fragments of experience, which she works with rather than on.

About the Artist

Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo is currently a Visual Arts MFA candidate at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at Marianne Boesky Gallery, c1760 Gallery, BRIC Arts Media, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Arnot Art Museum, The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Muskegon Museum of Art, and featured in publications such as Hyperallergic and “Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen”. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at BRIC Arts Media, Lazuli Residency, and the New York Academy of Art. She received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design.