Find Your Center: Sacred Geometry Mixed Media Workshop (Ages 11-15) 1S23

Adejoke Aderonke Tugbiyele is a multi-award winning, queer, Nigerian-American artist, architect, educator and advocate. She is the first, openly-queer woman of Nigerian descent to appear on CNN International in a 2014 interview with correspondent Vladimir Duthiers. In 2019, she was awarded the BISO2019! Grand Prize - Prix Leridon by the distinguished Gervanne Leridon Matthias Collection, she is a 2016 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant recipient, was listed as one of 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine in 2015 and in 2013, was awarded the U.S. Student Fulbright Fellowship (USA/Nigeria). She has sat on panels, taught and lectured internationally including at The Newark Museum of Art, The Museum of Arts and Design, The Julliard School NYC, New York University; The University of Texas at Austin: Center for Art of African and Its Diaspora, CultureSummit2017 in Abu Dhabi, Women in The World at Lincoln Center - NYC, Yale University’s Council of African Studies at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies - in partnership with the Smithsonian, Orange Academy in Lagos, Nigeria, the University of Dundee - Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Scotland, UK and at Harvard Nigerian Students Association at Harvard Law School in partnership with Harvard African Law Association. Her work has been mentioned and reviewed in numerous distinguished publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Transition Magazine, American Craft Magazine, The Sole Adventurer, Okay Africa, Sculpture Magazine, Art Africa Magazine, and Hyperallergic Magazine. Tugbiyele is author of the children’s book Find Your Center, a coloring book of sacred geometric drawings based on Yoruba principles. She received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Hillier College of Architecture and Design at NJIT in 2002 and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013. Her works reside in important public and private collections around the world.

Tugbiyele’s practice is inspired by Yoruba spirituality/cosmology, as well as universal ideas around transformation, flight and transcendence, but also ‘duality.’ Through the concept of ‘Visible/Invisible’ she explores multiple dualities including transparent/opaque, industrial/natural, masculinity/femininity and, spirituality/sexuality, all of which one might similarly find within Eastern philosophy and other indigenous cultures. The ‘double-helix’ is a reoccuring presence in her body of work. With recent works in lost-wax bronze, the majority of Tugbiyele’s sculptures employ metal/wire and palm stems repurposed from traditional African brooms. She is represented by October Gallery - London, UK.