Binta Ayofemi shapes new urban forms and urban materials, evoking power, Black space, and the senses. Binta Ayofemi is a 2022-2023 SECA award winner at SFMOMA, with an upcoming exhibition entitled Continuum featuring new sculptures, choreography and sound works. Ayofemi was also awarded a commission to create a sequence of art works in the new urban pavilion of the Oakland Museum from 2022-2023. Ayofemi’s Black Land series, begun as a YBCA fellow, opens this Spring 2022.
Inspired by the Black Panthers, Black Shakers, Ayofemi’s works infuse an Afrofuturist narrative with objects and experiences gathered, honed, milled and performed.
Ayofemi’s artwork Black Space / Black Storefronts, a series of sites and buildings beginning in Oakland, generates new narratives around urban voids, economy, displacement, freedom, duration, and radical imagination.
Ayofemi explores movement, making, manufacturing, and authorship of public and private space. Ayofemi’s activation of vacant sites, from an urban meadow to a reimagined corner store, suggests a state of mutability and transformation.
Ayofemi’s work has been featured by Untitled, Kadist Foundation, SFMOMA, the Carpenter Center, the Wattis Institute, the Asian Art Museum, the New Museum, dOCUMENTA, the British Arts Council, Rebuild Foundation, the AIA, and the City of Oakland.
Photo Credit: Yalonda James