Carver Museum names first cohort of artists to its residency project

The George Washington Carver Museum has named the first cohort of artists for its Small Black Museum Residency Project.

Adrian Armstrong, Temitope Olujobi and Hypatia Sorunke will engage in the three-month residency program during which they will develop new artwork and engage in professional development initiatives.

The residency program was started to support and promote both established and emerging artists of African descent who are largely underrepresented in institutions.

• Adrian Armstrong is a multidisciplinary artist from Omaha, NE now living and working out of Austin. Armstrong received his BFA from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in 2014. His work expands throughout different mediums such as music, painting, and printmaking, but his primary medium of choice is ballpoint pen. Through portrait and figurative practices, Armstrong’s work explores black identity and how the black body is perceived in predominantly White American spaces. He aims to portray what it means to be an African American living in modern America. Often using himself as an “every man” symbol, Armstrong’s work touches on topics such as depression within the black community, systematic oppression, and identity erasure; but on the other side of the spectrum explores, nostalgia, growth, and success.
• Temitope Olujobi is a Queer Nigerian-American Architect turned Game Designer originally from the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. They received their B.Arch from Syracuse University and their MFA from the Game Center at NYU. Temi began their indulgence into all things 3D and digital art in the Second Life modification community making freakishly delightful virtual dwellings for some very eccentric gamers. Since then, Temi has used their design practice to visualize all types of unreal worlds and speculative environments. They are the first ever Barlovento Foundation Scholar and seeks to continue the foundation’s mission of making games more inclusive through the theme’s in their work. Temi’s first big game exploring the intersections of Architecture, Narrative and Restorative Justice called Edge of Healing was a Different Games Festival (Boston, Mass) and the Game Developers of Color Conference (New York City, NY) selection. Temi’s digital artworks have been exhibited in galleries and books including the New York City Storefront for Art and Architecture and The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or What is the Power of Sh*t?
• Hypatia Sorunke (she/her) is a multimedia artist based in Austin, Texas. Originally a fiction writer, she has been able to combine her passions of storytelling and visual art through her photography, cinematography, and writing. Her artistic approach is best summed up by the Franz Fanon quote, “I am not a prisoner of History… In the world I am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself,” from Black Skin, White Masks. She often revisits this mantra to ground herself in the endless possibilities she imagines of the future, as her artistic process is like a child on a playground, where imagination leads and the body follows. As a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin with a Plan II Honors and African and African Diaspora Studies dual degree with a minor in Government, she is interested in understanding the ways that identity, culture, and nature intersect. After completing her creative thesis: Brownscale, she continues to use visual art as a way of making sense of the world around her. She hopes that by centering blackness and queerness, she works to create a visual world we can all live in.