Portrait of the artist. 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
Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo (Yemisi) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of painting and assemblage. 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.
Yemisi'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. Yet the breadth of their significance is flattened within a massive oversaturation of digitally circulated images. Her slow and deliberate re-presentation of these moments resists algorithmic complacency. From there, tracing their interconnectedness becomes part of her work’s aspiration to build political consciousness.
The sculptural components of her work are fashioned from discarded materials recovered from urban public space. She is driven by a desire to gather meaning out of that which is considered worthless. Yemisi calls upon the visual and spiritual cues of assemblage-based folk traditions such as memory jugs, bottle trees, altars, and gravesite offerings. Positioning grief as a site of both personal and political revelation, her works become containers for the transformation of individualized mourning into a collective force of resistance.
Sophia-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.