Adama Delphine Fawundu (b. 1971)
Ngewo Whispers, 2023
Archival Pigment on Aluminum
72 x 48 inches
182.88 x 121.92 cm
Edition 1 of 3
ADF097.1
We are pleased to announce that two works by Adama Delphine Fawundu have been acquired by the Akron Art Museum and are now part of the Museum’s collection.
The acquisition includes Sîmba #2 we blood, air, and water—recycled through time’s endless loop. hear the rhythm. step forward—for all who came and all to come (2025) and Ngewo Whispers (2023), bringing together two works that exemplify Fawundu’s deeply material and research-driven practice. Through photography, assemblage, and an expansive vocabulary of natural and found materials, Fawundu explores ancestral memory, cultural continuity, place, and belonging.
Fawundu’s practice brings together materials gathered across continents and generations, creating connections between personal histories, ancestral traditions, and the natural world. Sîmba #2 incorporates an extensive array of materials, including an antique quilt from Salt Lake City, Kuba cloth, raffia, healing herbs, copper, salt from the Great Salt Lake, palm fibers, calabash, clay beads from Bahia, cowrie shells from Brazil, Nigeria, Congo, and Sierra Leone, and feathers. The work also incorporates elements of water, wind, and sunshine gathered from Kinshasa, Freetown, Salt Lake City, Bahia, and Lagos.
Through these layered materials and geographic references, Fawundu constructs a visual language in which histories, landscapes, people, and traditions exist in continuous relation. The works reflect her ongoing engagement with the movement of people and materials across time and place, while foregrounding the enduring presence of ancestral knowledge and memory.
About the Artist
Adama Delphine Fawundu was born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. With over fifteen years experience working as a photographer, she enhanced her studio practice and completed her MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in 2018. She now uses photography, printmaking, video, sound and assemblage as an artistic language. As scholar Niama Safia Sandy writes, "Adama Delphine Fawundu’s work is about finding ways to connect with her kin – a group not merely confined to those who share a direct common ancestor but an expansive definition inclusive of the many who descend from the dispersed, the stolen, those for whom the violence, and opportunity wrought by the sea is at once a spectre and a fact of everyday life."
