Adama Delphine Fawundu is an American multi-disciplinary photographer and visual artist promoting African culture and heritage, a co-founder and author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora – a journal and book representing female photographers of African descent. Her works have been presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide.
Biography
Adama Delphine Fawundu was born in Brooklyn, NY, US in a family of Equatorial Guinean mother and Sierra Leonian father. She was the first child in the family born on American soil. Fawundu graduated from the Stony Brook UniversityBachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies/Mass Communications, African American Studies. During her study she contributed to the bi-weekly students newspaper "Blackworld". Later she studied at New York University, where received Masters of Arts in Media Ecology. She completed her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2018. Fawundu was married to Howard Buford and has three sons with him: Amal Buford, Che Ali Buford and Ras Kofi Buford.
Work
Fawundu started her artistic path as a photographer working in this field for over 15 years. As her work developed, the range of media she worked in expanded until it embraced new artistic techniques – printmaking, video, sound and assemblage. Fawundu incorporates elements of biography and geography, philosophy and mythology as well as individual and collective experience to reflect on different social issues, mostly concentrating on history and reality of the African Diaspora. A significant part of Fawundu's early career is her hip hop photography work. She started out working with The Source, Vibe and Beat Down Magazines that extended to her 10-year journey documenting hip-hop culture and urban music of the African Continent. In 1995 Fawundu on the assignment for Beat Down magazine photographed Prodigy and Havoc of Mobb Deep for their second album The Infamous. Starting from 2008 Fawundu documented hip hop, Afro-pop, and urban youth culture in Accra, Bamako, Dakar, Addis Abbaba, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Freetown, and Lagos. In 2015, Fawundu participated in the LagosPhoto Festival with a project "Deconstructing She" using herself as the subject to address stereotypes and prejudice over remnants of slavery. In 2016–17 Fawundu presented her work along with eight other artists as a part of the exhibition "Black Magic: AfroPasts/AfroFutures". Her installation "In the Face of History" is a wall of documents showing the oppression of various social groups, among which women and African American. The installation has also been shown as a part of "In Plain Sight/Site" exhibition in 2019 time after time being highly acclaimed by many reviewers. In 2017 along with Laylah Amatullah Barrayan she independently published a book and a journal "MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora" representing works of over hundred female photographers of African descent from all over the world. The critically acclaimed book resulted in Fawundu going on a book tour which included events at Tate Modern, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, International Center of Photography, Harvard University and other institutions. In 2019 the co-authors were invited to a talk within photographic festival in Los Angeles Photoville, organized by the nonprofit organization United Photo Industries. The book can be found in many libraries around the world including Victoria & Albert Museum, Columbia University, the New York Public Library and Harvard University. In 2019, Fawundu presented her show "The sacred star of Isis and other stories". She used mixed media photographic works to explore the relationship between traditional Mende beliefs from Sierra Leone and modern world values. The work was exhibited at two locations nationwide – at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and Crush Curatorial gallery in Chelsea, NYC. It is currently to be seen at Museum of African Diaspora. Fawundu's latest solo exhibit – "No Wahala, It's All Good: A Spiritual Cypher within the Hip-Hop Diaspora" – combines her early hip hop works with recent documentation of hip hop and urban music on the African continent representing cultural connection between Africa and its diaspora. Fawundu's photography and art works are exhibited in numerous private and public collections including Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Historical Society, New York; Corridor Gallery, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland; the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil; Norton Museum of Art in Villa La Pietra, Italy; the Brighton Photo Biennial, UK, and others.
Awards and recognition
Adama Delphine Fawundu has received numerous awards, including:
