Yétúndé Olagbaju

  • Yétúndé Olagbaju is an artist, organizer, strategist, and educator. Their practice employs video, sculpture, photography, gesture, and performance as methods to critically address Black labor, legacy, and processes of healing. Their practice draws upon a desire to understand history, the people that made it, the myths and realities surrounding them, and how Olagbaju’s own identity is implicated in history’s timeline. Major themes that the artist engages with in their work include myths and how they are produced, notions of motherhood, expectations concerning this role, and how racism and settler colonialism affect the ways that maternal and domestic labor are valued. In that vein,  the artist is also concerned with perceptions of labor, what it is and means, who conducts certain kinds of labor, and what kinds of labor go unnoticed or erased. They are also invested in exploring the kinds of stories that get  erased,  and whether erasure can be  conceived of as a tool for liberation and transformation. Considering transformation, Olagbaju’s work meditates on how change occurs and how to hold space for change and honor transformation. Questions that the artist poses hinge on memorialization and how to memorialize transformation and unseen labor. Pressingly, Olagbaju asks: How does one memorialize the vastness of Blackness and Black legacy?

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Yétúndé Olagbaju

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Yétúndé Olagbaju is an artist, organizer, strategist, and educator. Their practice employs video, sculpture, photography, gesture, and performance as methods to critically address Black labor, legacy, and processes of healing. Their practice draws upon a desire to understand history, the people that made it, the myths and realities surrounding them, and how Olagbaju’s own identity is implicated in history’s timeline. Major themes that the artist engages with in their work include myths and how they are produced, notions of motherhood, expectations concerning this role, and how racism and settler colonialism affect the ways that maternal and domestic labor are valued. In that vein,  the artist is also concerned with perceptions of labor, what it is and means, who conducts certain kinds of labor, and what kinds of labor go unnoticed or erased. They are also invested in exploring the kinds of stories that get  erased,  and whether erasure can be  conceived of as a tool for liberation and transformation. Considering transformation, Olagbaju’s work meditates on how change occurs and how to hold space for change and honor transformation. Questions that the artist poses hinge on memorialization and how to memorialize transformation and unseen labor. Pressingly, Olagbaju asks: How does one memorialize the vastness of Blackness and Black legacy?