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
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S. Yemisi Adeyemo is an interdisciplinary artist working between assemblage, painting, and sculpture. Using found materials recovered from urban public space, she draws from the methodologies of Afro-Diasporic folk and ritual objects, makeshiftery, the history of painting, and Black feminist fugitive thought to create layered devotional objects that move between painting, reliquary, and artifact. Her practice includes a distinct combination of imagery and materiality. 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 carefully selected moments survey both past and present: material conditions across global and domestic contexts, socio-political and counter-hegemonic movements, examples of resilience, and experiences of tremendous grief. Through a deliberate and critical unraveling of each image’s creation, the paintings are a growing counter-archive to the strategies of corporate media and the structures it works to uphold. From there, images ask to return to their identity as moments, and when placed in relation to one another, her hope is that they invite the viewer into critical political inquiry.
The sculptural and assembled components of her work are fashioned out of discarded objects and debris which she brings into the studio for spiritual collaboration. She regards these materials as casualties of capitalism, and thus their renewed life is a story of survival and resurrection. They've been thrown out and left in the street for many seasons, turned orange from oxidation, bleached by stints in the sun, or flattened by passing cars. She sees her collaboration with these materials as being in direct opposition to a "take-make-waste" system that designs everything to be disposable for the sake of maximizing corporate profit. She is guided by the tenets of African and African-American folk traditions such as memory jugs, bottle trees, altars, and gravesite offerings that call on ancient knowledge to transform everyday objects into vessels for spirit, grief, prayer and protection.
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 what is considered broken. She has come to understand grief as a site of both personal and political revelation. It is her hope that the combination of object, image, moment, and material in her work might begin to shift individualized mourning toward collective critical 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. She 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, New American Paintings 2026 MFA Annual Edition, Art Cube, and Forbes, where she was recognized on the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 Art & Style list. She was a 2023 recipient of The Real Art Award and a 2021 finalist of the Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters.
