Our Pew Fellows represent a diversity of perspectives across age, background, and creative disciplines. For our ongoing interview series, we invited visual artists Adebunmi Gbadebo and Odili Donald Odita to ask questions of each other that satisfied their own curiosities.  

As the two artists spoke live over Zoom, they found connections in their shared Nigerian heritage and the materiality of their respective mediums. The conversation that follows was recorded and edited for length and clarity. 

Gbadebo’s (she/her) multimedia visual art practice surfaces the often overlooked lives, creativity, labor, and oppression of people who were enslaved in the American South. Odita (he/him) uses color and pattern in abstract paintings, murals, and other public artworks that place African art and culture in dialogue with Western aesthetics. 

Odili Donald Odita 
How did you begin your practice? What started your interest in the work you do now? 

Adebunmi Gbadebo 
I've always created art. My first art class was at the age of three when my mom entered me into an art program at The Newark Museum. My practice started professionally while I was an art student at the School of Visual Arts [in NYC]. I had my first solo exhibition at Rutgers University while I was still a student. 

The work that I'm doing now began when I started to look more deeply into my own ancestry. I was working with human hair as an art material and thinking a lot about the information that's held in hair, the genetic, ancestral information that is in this material. The work was pointing me to really want to understand more of my own ancestry. My family knew the plantation we were enslaved on, which is kind of a rarity, but we had a name for the place. In 2020, I actually had the opportunity to visit the [True Blue] Plantation and stand in that space and feel what it feels like to be on this land that enslaved my ancestors. 

Odita 
That's very powerful. It's so important, I think, the way that you are focusing on history, your history, and essentially, African American history. We have a problem right now with book banning and history censorship and attacks on critical race theory, and these sorts of things. And so, for you to locate your enslaved ancestry and say: ‘This is where we were. This is the land,’ I think that that's really important, because you can't erase that. We must do all we can to make sure that we can preserve our memory, preserve our histories, and preserve our realities, and not have them evaporate into thin air. 

Gbadebo 
Can you discuss the ways in which you may pull from your family and bring them into your work? 

Odita 
My father told me a story about his grandmother and how he was taught to, in essence, conjure from drawing. She had a ritual process of cleaning and blessing the kitchen space. They would go and collect clay—it's a way of sanitizing the space—to put the new clay down on the surfaces where they were cooking. But also, they’d incorporate a process of doing a kind of drawing into the surface, with different colors that my father had to go and pick. And this drawing was important in the sense that it had to be a new drawing. It couldn't be the drawing that they did the day before. It had to be something new. 

And I find that absolutely fascinating, this idea of making something new each day to bless the day with a new thought or new energy and to allow yourself to conjure something that you have not seen before.  

Odita 
Can you speak about the sources and inspiration for your work? Are there any specific art forms or artists who help shape the way your work has developed? 

Gbadebo 
Right now, I'm looking at a lot of architects. Specifically, I'm really interested in the work of Mabel O. Wilson, an architect and professor at Columbia. Her work deals a lot with this idea of “the violence of the archive.” I'm really interested in the way she claims that to tell fuller stories of Black life and labor—especially as I come up against a lot of gaps, a lot of unknowns, a lot of things we just can't recover—instead of making up something to fill that gap, it’s worth just acknowledging that we just can't recover this information. And how do we represent that physically? 

I also read a lot of essays. One particular essay was influential in becoming a framework for how I approach my work, especially my ceramic series where I'm using the soil of the plantation. It’s called “What the Sand Remembers” by Vanessa Agard-Jones. 

It’s talking about how the land becomes a repository for memory in ways in which we can't look to books or history to tell us a story about a place. We could go directly to land. And that became important for me to think about—it really catapulted the decision to say that this soil, this ground, this grain of rice, this strand of hair is sufficient to tell these stories because of all the information that these things hold. 

Gbadebo 
How did your life as an artist influence the way you approached space when you were curating? And how does your time as a curator, if at all, influence how you approach space as an artist, especially one who works with such large spaces? 

Odita 
When I was writing about art, I realized that writing was such an important thing for me to do because it helped me to clarify my thinking. 

When I'm preparing my own exhibitions, I go about it as a curator in the sense of being able to home in on the statements that the work is trying to make early on in the process. One-person exhibitions are statements. In art school, you might think, OK, I have to finish eight things and I'll show them. But when you consider it like a curator, you’re thinking, What are those eight things doing with each other? How do they relate to each other? And how do they tell a story of the time in which they were made? 

I use curating and writing, in particular, to help me home in on my own path as a visual artist and my own understanding of what I'm doing and making. How do I build ideas through the material I’m working with? How do I manifest the material in ways that go beyond itself to become something else? And then how can it be used to communicate so that we all understand something together? 

It’s really powerful, that aspect of what we do as artists when we take something and form it and build it into something else that can then prompt a dialogue within our community. That's pretty transformative. And that's what my practice has helped me to do: see things in an elemental way and then begin to understand how to build from those elements. 

Odita 
How do you see your work in the world of ceramics and then in the world of art at large? How do you see your work growing and developing over the next ten years? 

Gbadebo 
It's interesting because my work with ceramics is fairly new, so there's a big part of it that I'm still trying to understand. But its debut was very large. The first series in ceramics went to the Met. So, there is a way in which it's become significant.  

One interesting thing that came about from the Met exhibition was that I was contacted by students at Clemson University, which was originally Fort Hill Plantation. About 700 enslaved and Black laborers were recently found buried unmarked on their campus. So, I've been working with these students to figure out, “How do we honor these 700 slave and Black laborers who are currently buried without any markers or acknowledgment?” That project showed me how my practice could have legs and really be a practice that becomes a way of honoring Black life or give meaning to spaces that are rendered invisible.  

I think my ability to take a material and give great meaning to it is the legacy that I'm moving toward through my practice. I recently inherited soil from Stoney Bluff Plantation, where Dave Drake, or Dave the Potter, was enslaved. Now I have this land that already has great meaning. It's already in there. But through my practice, I can amplify that, and make it accessible. In a way, I think it’s our power as artists—like with the way you were talking about your practice through the material paint—we can engage the material and enhance its meaning.  

And then there's a way in which I feel very young and very still early in my career and that sometimes, I don't know what ten years from now looks like. But I do feel that a lot of the opportunities that have come to my life, like major exhibitions, even becoming a Pew Fellow, are spiritual work. I very much feel like my path is laid down by my ancestors. 

Gbadebo  
Out of all the hundreds (or thousands) of colors you have created and used throughout your career, is there a particular color you’ve made that evokes a memory worth sharing here? 

Odita 
I don't really have any one color in particular because I feel like each one of these colors can become home, home in the sense of a space I can locate myself, or my thinking about the world. 

And right now, for example, I’m thinking a lot about the term ‘shadow’ and the idea of ‘darkness’ and ‘black’ and wanting to understand the negative connotations that come with those terms or in those ideas. They're just different degrees of light. I want to look at these darker colors as just color and then at the same time, investigate why we want to imbue the space called ‘dark’ as negative. I’m so interested in these words that relate to color being extinguished of light and to point out that these are just states of being. They're not bad things. They're not diminished. They're not less than. They're not absence of. They are color. It is color.  

I'm fascinated by the negative connotations that we have of those spaces in the world, and I'm thinking about how I can bring them into a different place; and relatedly, how we might consider people of color in a different way, Black people, Black and Brown.  

We asked the two artists a few questions of our own. 

What music are you listening to?  

Odita 
I listen to all sorts of music. Recently, I've been wanting to listen to a teacher of mine, Bill Dixon. He was an abstract jazz musician, Black musician making Black music, as he would call it and as it is. 

I go through different kinds of musical periods that help me to understand the spaces I'm thinking about in my own work as an abstract artist. I'm listening to Coltrane right now. I went through a period of listening to the late Miles Davis because I was interested in a fusion of African American consciousness and style. 

I'm listening to specific structural music to gain a better sense, a renewed sense of the spaces that I'm examining in my own work.  

Gbadebo 
I have a studio playlist. It's a mixture of what I would say is just Black music: Southern, gospel, Afrobeats, hip-hop, jazz. But lately, I've been listening to a lot of Max Roach. I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately, jazz or house. 
 
Odita 
Mm-hmm. House. I've been listening to a lot of techno and house and so forth. For me, music is about space. 

Gbadebo 
Yeah. And there's a way in which sonically, the music hits me when I'm working where I feel like I could work at a different level or dimension. It activates my body. And that activates the way I engage with the work. So I'm listening to a lot of house, and jazz, and Max Roach. 

If you could collaborate with anyone alive today, who would it be? 

Gbadebo 
Odili Donald Odita.  

Odita 
[LAUGHTER] That's nice. That's nice. 

Gbadebo 
Odili or some anthropologists. I recently started working with an architect, Nathan Williams. He teaches at Syracuse and was a fellow at Cornell. But he's now partnered with me for this Clemson University project. I like a collaboration with other fields of knowledge. 

Odita 
I've never thought about that question. I think being an artist, a visual artist is such an individual practice.  

I have had dreams of, say, what would it be like to work with David Hammons, for example, or Senga Nengudi? You and I, right now, we're talking. And it's just giving me an idea—you're giving me so much inspiration for this idea. 

My god, the things you say and what you talk about is like, wow. The potential of just speaking with you longer about these things just to open up aspects of where we connect and where we bridge off and how our ideas manifest in the world. But I'm sorry that I can't be specific about this because I can say that I don't know what it would be to work with David Hammons. I know that at the end of the day, I love what that guy makes. 

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? 

Gbadebo 
Logically, it feels like maybe anthropology. But the funny thing is, that's only true because of my practice. So, if I wasn't an artist, I don't know if that would be a natural path.  

Odita 
In a way, I don't think there could be any other practice for me. I looked at myself when I got out of school as having failed at everything except for art. 

Gbadebo 
[LAUGHTER] Yeah, me too. 

Odita 
I totally thought of myself as absolutely unemployable. But I'd have to say maybe a scientist of some sort. I love the test aspects of what I do in my work, looking, searching through and testing things, seeing what will happen. I think if I were a scientist, I could employ that love of testing to investigate things that I'm concerned with, like the environment, life, and nature. I’d want to solve questions of the natural world. 

Gbadebo
It's funny because thinking about professions, with both of us being Nigerian, there's sometimes this pressure to be a doctor, be an engineer, be a lawyer. And I mean, my dad was an engineer. My mom was a lawyer. But I was raised primarily by my mom. And she really nurtured me that anything would be possible, where my dad was a little bit more resistant. He's Nigerian. 

Did you get those same type of pressures? 

Odita 
Yeah, I'm Nigerian and Igbo. It's so typical—especially of people who come from post-colonial realities or third-world spaces and come to the West—they have these extremely strong ambitious value systems. “Be this. Be that. Do things that will establish you monetarily and societally in a high stature.” 

But I went into art. I was lucky to follow my dreams, rather than listen to everybody who said, “to be an artist means to starve and you're going to not make anything of this.” I've seen people who listened to that advice, who sublimated their dreams, who pushed them back to do something “normal” and who are not happy. And happiness is so important. It’s not something that is written. It is something that you have to investigate, invent, create, and nurture. I feel blessed and lucky to be an artist and to actualize a lot of success out of it. And success is relative. It's not about just money. It's about being able to have conversations like this.  

Gbadebo 
Yes. In very real ways, art has saved me. I'm very grateful for it.