2024

Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo’s solo exhibition Common Property: Sun Washed Waste of The West opens August 15, 2024, at Real Art Ways.

Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo (b. 1999 in Burlingame, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist creating liberatory visions. Both historical liberation struggles and current resistance movements are central to how Adeyemo constructs the scenes in her work. At the intersection of assemblage, painting, and sculpture, Adeyemo pulls from the visual sensibilities of graffiti, protest art, Cuban solidarity posters, hand-drawn shop signs, and non-canonized African-diasporic storytelling sensibilities as a means of contributing to a lineage of opposition. Adeyemo’s work includes a trash foraging practice, where she collects found and discarded objects from the street. She considers them to be “rejected by-products of a capitalist use-value structure,” and regards them animistically. They exist not only as found objects, but as fragments of experience, which she works with rather than on.

2023-2024

Smith Handy Projects is leading the redevelopment initiative and public art program for a 5-acre riverfront park in Virginia.

2022

Smith Handy Projects announces representation of Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo along with her first solo exhibition Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo: Earth & Iron: Archival Visions of Land and Struggle at BRIC on view 22 September 2022 - 8 January 2023.

2020

Jill Smith Handy was a contributor to the conversation series and book Culture as Catalyst published by the Tang Museum in 2020.