Makers

Internalized Landscapes

A queer Nigerian American artist and architect reflects on how inhabiting mind, body, space, and Yoruba cosmology informs her practice.

By Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele
December 15, 2022

Winter 2023

#In My Studio

Free To Read

Photo courtesy of Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele

Tugbiyele's Ellen, 2017.

As I inhabit the studio, I often consider differences between what we call art and design. Design emerges as a combination of intuition and function, whereas great art can emerge incredibly from trusted intuition alone. However, if one considers that both art and design carry a spiritual function, we begin to move into the creative space occupied by Indigenous societies and cultures around the world—a creativity that is aligned with nature and carries, by extension, the freedom to express one’s essential nature.

I have always inhabited the mental space that views art and architecture as a single entity. It could be my roots talking. West African Yoruba culture has for millennia established a highly developed cosmology and social architecture, which is not overtly apparent from its physical architecture. Perhaps this is why I find it so important to pull elements from one discipline to inform the other. Internally, I am always engaged in cross-disciplinary conversations in the studio.

However, the processes of both are very different. With the exception of some mixed-media works on canvas, which I have formed as sculptural reliefs from drawings, I do not produce any working drawings in my art practice, as I do with architecture. Certainly, never for the sculptures. It is pure intuition pouring forth.

When I look back at artworks I’ve created over the years, I always find threads that speak to architecture. Similarly, now that I am reengaging with architecture, my artistic background shines through very clearly.

Within my multidisciplinary practice, I explore hybridity in terms of balancing masculine and feminine energy, or sexuality, but also when it comes to duality with my materials. Merging natural and industrial forms, I draw inspiration from Yoruba spirituality and cosmology as it flows with universal links that also seek to bridge and weave African, African American, and diaspora concerns.

My architectural design, Visible/Invisible, is informed by a sacred symbol of interlocking links within Yoruba culture. To help the understanding of those not familiar, I call it an “African Yin-Yang,” through which I invite visitors and audiences to seek reconciliation within themselves. I encourage them to ask deeper questions, such as, “What is your destiny or purpose?” Essentially, it’s about developing a worldview or deeper sense of the environment that permeates all aspects of life.

Photo courtesy of Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele

Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele in her former studio at Project for Empty Space in Newark, New Jersey. On the back wall, top, is Tugbiyele’s The Road to Divinity, 2021, from the series Royal Blood.

“It is important to inhabit mind, body, and spirit simultaneously so that the artist can be a master of her domain and operate with a sense of balance and sovereignty.”

— Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele

WHERE I’M FROM / WHAT I EXPLORE

Seven or eight years of my childhood were spent living in Lagos, Nigeria. Some of my time there involved yearly trips to Igbajo—located in Osun State—to visit my grandparents and extended family relatives. Those long trips out of the highly populated megacity, through the tropical rainforest, and then up into the hilly, mountainous terrain of Igbajo, made a sound impression on me that remains to this day.

In 1988, my family returned to Brooklyn, New York, where I’d been born. Soon after, I enrolled in the architecture program at the specialized High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. From as early as age five, I was exposed to highly diverse landscapes and environments, which became internalized over time.

This early foundation, coupled with my travels as an adult to different parts of the world within Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and various regions of the United States, means that today, I have the ability to navigate different types of cultures, areas, environments, and cities with relative ease. I understand how all human beings are linked in nuanced ways, beyond identity. And so my work explores the concept of transformation toward transcending identity, while simultaneously queering dominant space.

INHABITING THE BODY / HONORING THE STUDIO

The way I inhabit my body and space is by looking “beneath the surface.” In essence, it is a spiritual journey which then manifests physically in the work. I believe that within the studio, it is important to inhabit mind, body, and spirit simultaneously so that the artist can be a master of her domain and operate with a sense of balance and sovereignty.

It has taken time to arrive at true balance, simply because of the spiritual discord taking place within my own physical body—difficult years of “coming out” as a lesbian much later in life—and to come to a place of acceptance as I occupy my body and environment.

I believe in the power of art to transform us, both physically and spiritually. I thus view the studio as sacred space, whereby artmaking is a form of meditation and prayer. I work best in complete silence most of the time.

Photo courtesy of Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele

Mother & Children, 2022, is a work in progress. It’s made from palm spines, wire, indigo spray paint, and resin.

WHAT I OBSERVE / HOW I CREATE

I try to spend much time observing nature. I also have started merging art and architecture in new and profound ways, thanks to my recent enrollment in the Design Discovery program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, I stayed in a lovely home in Watertown that had beautiful front and rear gardens filled with a diversity of plants and flowers, along with a few sculptures of the sacred Buddha. I love to enter a garden studio with a sense of wonder, magic, and anticipation.

I approach nature with the open willingness to discover a newly emerged branch, the beginnings of a new stem, perhaps the opening of a flower. The abundant fresh air, the morning sunlight, and the chirping of birds are invigorating. Within a seed, a plant, or a flower are miraculous creative forms with their own unique order. A tree is a structure with deep, strong roots beneath the ground’s surface that render it able to withstand storms. From this, we can draw metaphors about our own cultural roots and how they anchor and guide us.

The smell of fresh grass and plants is a delightful natural intoxicant, which feeds into the energy I need and desire for my work. In the garden, creative ideas come to mind rapidly and spontaneously. So, when I begin producing sculpture, a great flow is already established that lends itself quite well to my overall process.

Among the primary materials I use in the studio are palm spines (igbale in Yoruba), bundled to form traditional African brooms. Palm carries a social and political charge related to the multiplicity of its uses over millennia: spiritual, medicinal, industrial, and cultural. My sculpture The Road to Divinity, which depicts two female bodies intertwined, weaves palm spines with wire and metal, combining natural and industrial elements.

Photo by Katerina Sorrentino, courtesy of the October Gallery

This costume for Shifting the Waves includes palm spines, metal, wire, rubber, spray paint, and a repurposed boombox. The 2017 solo performance was held at the Contemporary African Art Fair in London.

WHO INSPIRES ME / MY ROYAL FAMILY

I draw inspiration from my contemporaries in the visual arts, especially queer and female artists, and artists of African descent. My practice has been enriched by so many, including Sokari Douglas Camp, Zanele Muholi, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Yinka Shonibare, and El Anatsui, a sculptor from Ghana who lives and works in Nigeria. Anatsui’s work, a sort of cloth made of aluminum bottle caps and copper wire, seemingly insignificant materials, carries with it loaded history while presenting as pure poetry. It speaks, so that when we “wear” it we are speaking as newly transformed beings.

Much of my work similarly speaks to the idea of interwoven histories, both materially and formally, across different contexts in time and space. Yoruba cosmology and aesthetics understand that all life is interconnected.

My first interaction with Anatsui was during the construction of his pyramid structure at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, during its Earth Matters exhibition. I recognize that my background as an architect was central to how I approached the installation of Anatsui’s incredible work. This led Anatsui to invite me to manage his subsequent installation at Amsterdam’s ArtZuid exhibition. The cross-disciplinary approach of art and design found a common language that we both recognized.

I also am inspired by ancestors and elders within my royal family, including my grandpa, Chief Emmanuel Akande Tugbiyele (a Harvard Graduate School of Education alumnus), who laid strong foundations for my growth and development, and my paternal grandmother, Princess Ruth Adetutu Tugbiyele. However, I understand the responsibility that comes with privilege. As the saying goes, “To whom much is given, much is expected.”

At this time, I am revisiting a mixed-media fabric work called Ellen that brings many of the themes of my life and artistic practice together. The piece is an attempt to capture the profile of love at a distance. It is inspired by the general sensibility of the original image, which I read as bridging Eastern, Western, and African aesthetics. There is a sense of meditation and ritual in the woman’s face, and a heightened self-awareness. I have delicately applied palm spines to her cloak. Ultimately, with Ellen, I have romantically queered traditional royal regalia within Yoruba culture. The woman’s quiet and contemplative demeanor resonated so strongly with me that I am reinterpreting the work with a personal photo.

Ellen is personal to me for another reason: it employs as canvas a Dutch wax fabric, a piece of the actual family cloth I wore at my grandpa’s funeral. In revisiting this work, I am crossing a new threshold of inhabiting mind, body, and spirit simultaneously.

Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele is an award-winning visual artist and architect living in New York City. Her work is included in public, private, and corporate collections around the world. Portrait by Ade Odetola.

Photo courtesy of Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele

Ellen, 2017, is composed of a Dutch wax family cloth Tugbiyele wore at the funeral of Prof. Emmanuel Akande Tugbiyele, palm spines, spray paint, tempera, chalk, and ink, 46.5 x 45 in.

Photo courtesy of The Melrose Gallery

Tugbiyele in Eagle/Bull, 2019, a performance featuring musician Stompie Selibe at The Melrose Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. The costume includes grass brooms, thread, wire, LED lights, iqhiya cloth, and a repurposed woven shield.

Photo courtesy of Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele

My Queen’s Throne: The Last Quarter, 2020, palm spines, metal, wire, hardware cloth, black spray paint, resin, and the Dutch wax family cloth, 44 x 36 x 30 in.

Photo courtesy of Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele

K’ori ran, 2021, palm spines, wire, indigo spray paint, and resin, 14 x 14 x 18 in.

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Visit Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele's website and Instagram.

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This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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