After reviewing 570+ applications from all over the world for 500 Capp Stree’ts Artist Residency open call for local, national and international artists, yétúndé olagbaju has been awarded the 2023-2024 recipient. Olagbaju is a research-based artist, organizer, and residency director living on Ohlone and Tongva lands (Bay Area & Los Angeles, CA). Their work roots in a single question: What must we reckon with as we build a future, together?
yétúndé proposed a compelling project titled a spiral fuels and fills that included developing co-designed performance and sculptural works that will activate the patio, “grotto”, and living rooms, and fireplaces within the home. This project will be centered around olagbaju’s continued exploration with bronze casting, and interests in cultivating community spaces. They say that “this project offers a vital opportunity to integrate my life, art, values, and collaborative processes. A spiral fuels and fills will allow me to expand this opportunity and work collaboratively with other Black, queer, trans*, and Indigenous artists in creating meaningful and transformative works.”
The focus of this year’s program is to create work highlighting experimentation that expands the boundaries of genre, medium and material. For this residency yétúndé will have three months for research and an additional two months for the final project and an honoraria and production prize of $20,000. yétúndé will use the house as their live or work studio, have access to The Paule Anglim Archive Room and David Ireland Archive and be in close consultation with curator Lian Ladia.
This residency is made possible through generous multi-year support from the Sanger Family Foundation.
About yétúndé olagbaju
With no set answers or expectations, olagbaju unravels intricate connections as a means of highlighting our interdependence. They are interested in how our familial, platonic, romantic, and ecological bonds are affected by what we confront in the reckoning.
Inspired by the divine and the quotidian within Blackness, they use the moving-image, the spatial, and the collaborative in order to explore possible futures.
Through their social practice they have co-founded and are a member of numerous artist and worker-led collectives, each with liberatory missions and values. An advocate for non-hierarchical working structures, they embrace shared leadership models that challenge white supremacy, by actively rejecting disposability and urgency — two of its guiding tenets.
They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of multiple awards including a YBCA 100 award and a Headlands Center for the Arts fellowship. They were a recent award finalist with ART X Prize, organized by ART X Lagos and will be a resident at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), Center for Afrofuturist Studies (Iowa City, IA), and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) in 2023.