Adama Delphine Fawundu | For mama adama
July 1st—August 9th, 2021 | Press release
OPENING RECEPTION Thursday, July 1st, 6—8pm
From the series: For Mama Adama, Cyanotypes on fabric attached with hair, 67” x 22”
Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present For Mama Adama, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Adama Delphine Fawundu.
The exhibition displays nearly thirty works made by Fawundu in the last several years, some of which she developed as a 2020 Penumbra Workspace artist-in-residence.
In these works, Fawundu appropriates motifs found on her grandmother's fabrics and transforms them into patterns of exploration. Experimenting with color, form, scale and surface and using textiles, papers and different photo-graphic processes, Fawundu examines the relationship between materiality and identity.
In reflection on the personal nature of her subject matter and process, Fawundu writes, “For Mama Adama is a spiritual conversation between myself and my grandma Adama who passed away in 1997. At times, I am her, as she continues to see through my eyes, the daughter of her first son. This series was inspired by my grandmother’s Garra textile business in Pujehun, Sierra Leone. Garra is a form of tie-dying and batiking. I have a collection of her textiles, some of which she created over 50 years ago and now form the basis for generating the negatives and positives used in my production of silver gelatin, photo lumen, cyanotype, screen and linoleum prints.
Drawing on the layered nature of Garra fabrics, I combine these processes to create new patterns and new languages while activating body memory and my ancestral consciousness. This work is an exploration of the complex nature of identity and reproduction. Building on previous knowledge, we are free to conceive new ideas, new spaces and new ways of being by awakening the radical imagination and dynamically expressing who we were, who we are and who we want to be.”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Cyanotypes on fabric attached with hair, 63” x 22”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Cyanotype on fabric attached with hair, 21.5” x 12”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Cyanotype on fabric, 66.5” x 12”
From the series: For Mama Adama Cyanotypes and block printing on fabric attached with hair, 46.5” x 12”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Cyanotype on fabric attached with hair, 26.5” x 16”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Lumen print on RC paper with block printing and mixed media, 8.5” x 11"
From the series: For Mama Adama, Silver gelatin prints with silkscreen, 9.5” x 8”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Silver gelatin prints with silkscreen, 9.5” x 8”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Silver gelatin prints with silkscreen, 9.5” x 8”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Inkjet print on rice paper with hair, 50” x 24”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Inkjet print on rice paper with block print, 50” x 24”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Inkjet print on rice paper, 50” x 24”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Inkjet print on rice paper with hair, 50” x 24”
From the series: For Mama Adama, Inkjet print on rice paper, 50” x 24”
Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa.
Ms. Fawundu co-founded and independently published the sold-out book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. The critically acclaimed book MFON led Fawundu on a book tour which included talks at The Tate Modern, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harvard University amongst many other institutions.
She was nominated for and won the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, named OkayAfrica’s 100 Women making an impact on Africa and its Diaspora and included in the Royal Photographic Society’s (UK) Hundred Heroines, in 2018. Her other awards include NYFA Photography Fellowship, Brooklyn Art Council Grant, Open Society Foundation Community Fellow, the Brooklyn Historical Society Community Initiative Grant. She has been an artist in residence at BRIC Workspace, Center for Book Arts and Penumbra Foundation.
Ms. Fawundu has exhibited internationally, with two solo shows in 2019 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and Crush Curatorial gallery in Chelsea, NYC. Her works are included in private and public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The Norton Museum of Art, Corridor Art Gallery, The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland and The Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.
Images © Adama Delphine Fawundu