Maria Ogedengbe, née Creyts, is an American artist whose works bring together disparate disciplines within and beyond visual arts. She earned her BFA at Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from Yale University School of Art. Ogedengbe’s works include large-scale panorama photo projects portraying textile subjects she creates, billboards, public sculpture integrating painting on canvas, and the social sculpture, Missouri GOURDen, a community garden perched on Troost Avenue in Kansas City’s Kauffman Legacy Park adjacent to the Missouri Department of Conservation’s Discovery Center. Missouri GOURDen is a 15 foot bentwood garden house built to the artist’s design over which gourds for making musical instruments are cultivated by people from neighborhoods across the city. “…this interactive space dedicated to gardening, education, music, performance, and art is designed to both inspire artists and bring the community together…Visible year round, the charming garden house flourishes through the summer and fall.” Ogedengbe’s 2017 15-foot public sculpture, Fancy This, is described as a fanciful sailboat, moored in a park, that leaves summer daydreams of journeys by river or sea in its wake In Art in the Loop’s Project Cue catalog. With this work and another boat sculpture, Fancy Buoy, the artist painted the front and back of the sails as if they were giant canvases. In 2015 Ogedengbe was commissioned to create imagery for double billboards for a 3-month display in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District. The artist’s concept was a photo project representing paintings from the amusing tale of an art contest between artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius of ancient Greece. In the Kansas City Star, Cindy Hoedel reported, "To make her giant billboards, Ogedengbe constructed two still lifes in her studio - one featuring a giant bowl filled with grapes and a second of an ornate hand-dyed batik fringed curtain…” In keeping with the format used with other photo projects by the artist, the curtain was a prop the artist created from fabric – fabric she dyed herself, in this case. Ogedengbe has also presented her images on billboards in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Chicago. Her large-scale photo friezes have been exhibited at the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo in Oaxaca de Juárez and at the University of LagosVisual Arts Gallery, among other venues.
