Who We Be

Adama Delphine Fawundu

Delphine Fawundu revisits her experimental video “Who We Be,” which follows performer James “Biggie Flighter” Benjamin Lewis, through Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The film becomes a sonic collage blending verses, instrumentals, and speeches exploring the African Diaspora’s linguistic diversity. Here, Fawundu also debuts the wallpaper “Who We Be II,” which incorporates her kpoto patchwork technique that gathers images to create new patterns and is inspired by the Mende and Krío peoples of Sierra Leone. In “Who We Be II,” Fawundu uses an image of a large crowd she photographed  at a hip-hop concert on a beach in Ghana and repeats it, emphasizing points of connectivity and collectivity throughout the Black world.

About Adama Delphine Fawundu

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist born in Brooklyn, NY the ancestral space of the Lenni-Lanape. She is a descendant of the Mende, Krim, and Bubi peoples. Her distinct visual language centers around themes of indigenization, and ancestral memory. Fawundu co-published the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora.

Fawundu’s video portrait “The Undoing” opened at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2022 participating in a three-year touring exhibition The Outwit 2022: American Portraiture Today. Fawundu was commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory to participate in the 100 Years | 100 Women Project / The Women’s Suffrage NYC Centennial Consortium (2019–2021). Her public artwork includes a fifty-foot video mural Wata Bodis commissioned by Audible and a seventy-foot mural Courage produced through a collaboration with Newark Bold Women’s Leadership Network and Project for Empty Space. Her solo exhibitions include the Newark Museum of Art, The Princeton University Museum’s Art@Bainbridge, Hesse Flatow Gallery, The Penumbra Foundation, and The African American Museum in Philadelphia. She has participated in group exhibitions at Fotografiska, Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Rice University Moody Center for Arts, The Goodman Gallery (South Africa), The Bamako Encounters Biennial of African Photography, Kunstverein Braunschweig, California African American Museum, The Gropius Bau, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, amongst others.

Her awards include the 2023 Catchlight Fellowship, the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the New York Foundation for The Arts Photography Fellowship, and the Rema Hort Mann Artist Grant, amongst others. She has participated in artist-in-residencies at the Yaddo, Center for Book Arts, Project for Empty Space, The Brandywine Workshop, The LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University, and the African Artist Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Princeton University Museum; Bryn Mawr College; The Petrucci Family Foundation of African American Art, Asbury, NJ; The Brooklyn Historical Society; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; The David C. Driskell Art Collection, College Park, MD; and a number of private collections. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.