Asmaa Amadou
Textiles MFA
Rhode Island School of Design
Specialisms: Fine Art / Textiles / Sculpture
Location: New York, United States
Asmaa Amadou
First Name: Asmaa
Last Name: Amadou
Specialisms: Fine Art / Textiles / Sculpture
Sectors:
My Location: New York, United States
University / College: Rhode Island School of Design
Course / Program Title: Textiles MFA
About
Asmaa Amadou (b. 1994, Lomé, Togo) is an interdisciplinary textile artist, researcher, and designer based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in Textiles from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). and BA in Anthropology from SUNY New Paltz. Her practice explores relationships between materials, landscape, and cultural memory through textiles, sculpture, installation, sound, and moving images. Grounded in anthropological inquiry, West African textile traditions, and contemporary textile technologies, she approaches making as a form of research. Working across weaving, natural dyeing, sewing, silkscreen, embroidery, ceramics, beadwork, casting. She investigates how materials carry and generate ecological, cultural, and historical knowledge while revealing relationships between people, land, labor, and history. Amadou’s work is currently on view at the Gelman Gallery in the RISD Museum until October 11th.
Her work has been exhibited at the Gelman Gallery RISD Museum (Providence, RI); Francine Kelly Gallery at the featherstone center for the arts (Martha's vineyard, MA); 92 Seattle Street Gallery Harvard University (Allston, MA); Sol Koffler Gallery and Bowen Suite Gallery (Providence, RI); RISD Black Artists + Designers × Carr Haus (Providence, RI); BGX Gallery and Ideal Glass Studio Gallery (New York, NY); and Casa Abierta and Thread Caravan (Oaxaca, Mexico).
She is the recipient of the RISD Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund (SSIF) grant, RISD Maharam STEAM Fellowship, RISD Turner grant, Brooklyn Arts Council Creative Social Innovation Fellowship, and Leopold Schepp Fellowship.
Where do you sit, if not on soil ground, began with my understanding of ground as a living body, a place where human and material histories intersect, interact, transform, and remain. I was born and raised Lomé, Togo until I was thirteen when I moved to New York City with my family. In My thesis work, I was investigating the land and cultural history, and the memory of traveling from the coastal city of Lomé to our northern village Cinkassé every summer when I was little. To me, ground is an animate presence that intersects nature, vegetation, memory, labor, and everyday life. Through this installation, textile becomes another kind of ground: something that can hold, reveal, and communicate layered histories through the use of repetition. I was interested in exploring my ideas around ground throught the merging figurative and abstraction, blending weaving, photo, microscopic studies, field studies, watercolor paintings, clay, glass, glass beads, wood, metal, indigo, soil, and salt.
Competitions
