Portrait of the artist and Bijou. 2026, New Haven, CT
“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
S. Yemisi Adeyemo is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of assemblage, painting, and sculpture. She draws from the visual languages of Afro-diasporic traditions, folk and ritual objects, shanty structures, makeshift and make-do tactics, Black feminist thought, and the history of painting to create devotional and disobedient objects.
Adeyemo’s practice includes a distinct combination of imagery and materiality. Carefully selected primary source photographs from articles, social media, and digitized archives serve as reference material for the painted vignettes that dress the surfaces of her work. These choice moments survey both current and historical events: material conditions across global and domestic contexts, socio-political and counter-hegemonic movements, examples of resilience, and experiences of tremendous grief. The slow and deliberate re-presentation of these images is an attempt to resist algorithmic complacency and reshape the ephemeral into material. From there, tracing the interconnectedness of each moment becomes part of her work’s aspiration to build political consciousness.
The sculptural components of Adeyemo’s work are fashioned out of discarded materials recovered from urban public space. She calls upon the visual and spiritual cues of such assemblage-based folk traditions as memory jugs, bottle trees, altars, and gravesite offerings. 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 that which is considered broken. Positioning grief as a site of both personal and political revelation, Adeyemo’s works are containers for the transformation of individualized mourning into a collective force of resistance.
S. Yemisi Adeyemo 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. Yemisi was a 2025-2026 NXTHVN Studio Art Fellow and a 2021 BRIClab Contemporary Arts Resident. She has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Liverpool University's Sculpture Journal, Art Cube, and Forbes, where she was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Art & Style list. She will appear in the forthcoming MFA Annual issue of New American Paintings. She was a 2023 recipient of The Real Art Award and a 2021 finalist of the Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters.