“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 between assemblage, painting, and sculpture. Using found materials recovered from urban public space, she creates layered devotional objects that move between altarpiece and artifact.
In her practice, dejected remnants become emblems of survival, brought into the studio for resurrection and spiritual collaboration. She finds these objects after they’ve been left in the street for many seasons, turned orange from oxidation, bleached by stints in the sun, or flattened by passing cars. For Adeyemo, discarded materials have a dual positionality as both casualties of capitalist planned obsolescence, and storytellers of endurance. She sees this aspect of the work in direct opposition to the “take-make-waste” system that designs for disposability to maximize corporate profit. In her assemblage process, she is guided by tenets of African and African-American folk traditions such as memory jugs, bottle trees, altars, and gravesite offerings, which call on ancient knowledge to transform everyday objects into vessels for prayer and protection.
From there, assembled surfaces become grounds for painted vignettes; scenes drawn from articles, social media, and archives. Through a critical unraveling of each image’s context and circulation, painting becomes a counter-archival practice to corporate media and the power structures it upholds. From there, images ask to return to their identity as moments, and invite the viewer into critical political inquiry. Adeyemo’s practice is, in many ways, informed by her late father and the material remnants of his life as an inventor. Because of him, she is driven to assemble meaning out of what is considered broken. Positioning grief as a site of personal and ideological revelation, her work hopes to shift individualized mourning toward collective critical resistance.
S. Yemisi Adeyemo received a BFA in Painting from RISD and an MFA in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She was a 2025-2026 NXTHVN Studio Art Fellow and a 2021 BRIClab Contemporary Arts Resident. Select exhibitions include Marianne Boesky Gallery, BRIC, Picture Theory Gallery, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Muskegon Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, Liverpool University Press’ Sculpture Journal, Art Cube, and Forbes, where she was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Art & Style list.
