BINTA AYOFEMI

Binta Ayofemi (b. Brooklyn) is an Oakland-based visual artist shaping new urban forms and urban materials to evoke power, Black space, and the senses. Inspired by the Black Panthers and Black Shakers, Ayofemi’s works infuse an Afrofuturist narrative with objects and experiences gathered, honed, milled and performed. Ayofemi’s artwork GROUND, 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 Art (San Francisco), Kadist Foundation (San Francisco), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard (Cambridge), the Wattis Institute (San Francisco), Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), the New Museum (New York), dOCUMENTA (Kassel), the British Arts Council, Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation (Chicago), the American Institute of Architects, the City of Oakland, and the City of San Francisco. Ayofemi was awarded a commission to create a sequence of art works in the new urban pavilion of Oakland Museum from 2022-2023. Her project Land Back, Land Black, an artwork experience celebrating Black and Indigenous presence was developed as part of YBCA 10 in 2022. Ayofemi, a 2022-2023 SECA award winner, is currently presenting her corresponding solo exhibition Continuum featuring new sculptures, choreography and sound works at SFMOMA through May 2023.