Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Performance, installation, photography, spaces
Website: cultexhibitions.com
Binta Ayofemi was born in Brooklyn, New York, and has long been based in Oakland, California, where the city’s streets, storefronts, and vacant lots are the primary medium of her practice. She is a studio member at Minnesota Street Project and a community partner of Black Cultural Zone. Her work has been presented at SFMOMA, KADIST Foundation, the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard, the Wattis Institute, the Asian Art Museum, the New Museum, dOCUMENTA 13, the British Arts Council, Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation, and the City of Oakland. She is a 2022–2023 SFMOMA SECA Award winner, a 2021–2022 YBCA honoree, and was awarded a commission for a sequence of artworks in the new urban pavilion of the Oakland Museum from 2022–2023.
Ayofemi shapes new urban forms and urban materials — found corrugated steel, raw and milled eucalyptus, reclaimed storefronts, vacant lots — to evoke power, Black space, and the senses. Inspired by the Black Panthers and the Shakers, her Afrofuturist practice infuses objects and experiences with narratives around urban voids, economy, displacement, freedom, duration, and radical imagination. Her ongoing series BLACKSPACE transforms abandoned storefronts and derelict sites in Oakland into functioning community spaces: an urban meadow, a general store, a gathering place for performances, music, and movement. Her performance work has involved turf dancers activated between BART stations; her sound works and choreographic installations have accompanied her sculptural practice in institutional exhibitions. The practice refuses to separate art from community building, constantly moving between gallery, street, and neighborhood.
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