Professor Adama Delphine Fawundu Receives Inaugural Residency

Assistant Professor Adama Delphine Fawundu ’18 has been named the first-ever artist in residence of the Prospect Park Alliance, a non-profit organization that collaborates with the city to manage the borough's second-largest green space. 

Fawundu will work at Prospect Park’s Lefferts Historic House Museum, drawing upon research conducted by the Alliance’s new ReImagine Lefferts initiative to construct a large-scale, site-specific textile installation. This creation, according to the Prospect Park statement, will align with the initiative’s objectives to redirect educational focus and redefine the history and importance of the indigenous Lenapehoking people, whose unceded land the house occupies, as well as the Africans enslaved by the Lefferts family.

“When the Alliance reached out it was so special because we were both on a specific trajectory,” Fawundu, born and raised in Brooklyn, said in a statement. “My whole existence is based in this neighborhood. The smell of the grass when it rains in the park means so much to me… I have such a history here. It felt very much like a 360 degree event to connect with the ReImagine team here in Prospect Park.”

This partnership with Fawundu builds on her previous park projects, including her 2020 performance In the Face of History Freedom Cape, which was partially filmed in Lefferts Historic House and Prospect Park, and the 2021 Joyful Blues installation at the Lena Horne Bandshell with BRIC.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. She is a co-author/editor of the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. Fawundu was featured in the critically acclaimed Netflix documentary film, In Our Mother’s Garden, directed by Shantrelle P. Lewis.  She was awarded a Rema Hort Mann Artist Grant as well as the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship amongst other awards. 

Fawundu has presented public installations at Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Federal Hall in New York City.  Solo show exhibitions and performances include Art@Bainbridge/Princeton University, The Penumbra Foundation, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, The Miller Theater at Columbia University, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, African American Museum in Philadelphia, and Granary Arts amongst others. 

Her National and International exhibitions include Brooklyn Museum of Art, Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), Kunstverein Braunschweig, Maryland Institute of Art, Moody Center for the Arts, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Chale Wote Art Festival (Ghana), the 12th Edition of the Bamako Encounters Photography Biennial (Mali), Norton Museum of Art, Prizm Art Fair, and the California African American Museum, amongst others. She has participated in artist residencies at the Center for Book Arts, the African Artist Foundation (Nigeria), the Penumbra Foundation, BRIC Workspace Residency, and Project for Empty Space.

Her works can be found in the the collections at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Princeton University Museum, Bryn Mawr College, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Norton Museum of Art, the David C. Driskell Center (University of Maryland), the Petrucci Family Foundation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, as well as private collections.