WHEN:
September 4 - October 18 2025
For more information visit the Nicola Vassell website.
WHERE:
Nicola Vassell
138 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
A spokesperson describes the event as follows:
“...Watch Out for the Ghosts, an exhibition of new work by Adebunmi Gbadebo, the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The title—a quote from Amari Baraka's poem The Why's and the Wise-echoes Gbadebo's journey through loss, family history and reconnecting with the land they once inhabited. In bringing together works made in ceramic and paper along with a short film, this exhibition signals the evolution of the artist's conceptual practice and the deepening of her research into material and process. Upon learning of her ancestors' enslavement on True Blue plantation in Fort Motte, South Carolina, Gbadebo made the site a focal point of her work. For the past three years, she has hand dug soil from the cemetery that she then transforms into clay for her ceramic vessels. The works' unique sizes and anthropomorphic shapes instinctively develop as she hand builds each of them using a Nigerian and Cameroonian coiling technique. Beyond the soil which they are made of, Gbadebo's vessels carry-inside them or on their surfaces —invocations of True Blue's landscape, sometimes being filled with pine needles, Carolina gold rice or woven segments of donated hair, all while acting as bodies occupying space..."
