The Transformative Work of Adejoke Tugbiyele
How can we sweep away dirt that has piled up so thick, it has formed nearly an impenetrable wall? The new broom is not for sweeping, but rather breaking down barriers that continue to rob women of dignity and respect.
– Adejoke Tugbiyele (2019)
Born in New York, raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and now based in Brooklyn, NY, Adejoke Tugbiyele creates sculptural work and performance pieces that explore the concept of transformation. Through her work, Tugbiyele explores human relationships, particularly between women, aiming to shed a queer light on traditionally white, male dominated spaces.
Tugbiyele describes her practice as “hybrid” – a combination of responding to materials and the physical process of making and creating forms that emit an inherent energy. Her current process was established while researching gender and sexuality in Lagos. From that conceptual starting point, Tugbiyele uses diverse materials, such as traditional African brooms, bronze, wire, fabric, wood, LED lights, and photography, to create work that responds to the oppression faced by many African women, underscoring critical matriarchal systems and paradigms. These pieces examine the dualities extant in the masculine and feminine, and in the natural and industrial.
Destiny’s Child, featured in Objects: USA 2020, is composed of grass-brooms, known as Umchayelo, that intertwine to depict the coupling of two figures that represent and assert the intrinsic power of Black and African women. During apartheid in South Africa, Black rural women produced grass brooms for utilitarian, medicinal, and spiritual purposes, signifying “a rebellious form of socio-economic freedom, independence, a response to patriarchy, an act of self-love and towards self-sufficiency in caring for their families,” according to Tugbiyele. In this piece, she honors this legacy and “speaks to the power of transformation experienced by African women who found agency (…) disrupt[ing] the cycle of exclusion perpetuated by systems of racism and sexism."
Tugbiyele contemplated the idea of destiny for herself, for the work’s concept and materiality, and for the viewer. In engaging with Destiny’s Child, she invites her audience to ask:
Having achieved a level of transformation - perhaps wildly beyond the imagination of elder broom-makers in the Eastern Cape - what further aesthetic movements are possible at a monumental scale?
Economically, can the material’s destined use give back to the broom-making community, birthing a new era of economic vitality for African women…?
Adejoke Tugbiyele received a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Architecture from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, New Jersey School of Architecture (now the Hillier College of Art & Design) and a Master of Fine Art (MFA) in Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is a recipient of the Grand Prix Leridon (2019) and The Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016). Her work is in the collection of The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Arts and Design, National Museum of African Art - Smithsonian Institution, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, among others.