In London, a New Exhibition Heralds the Creative Abundance of Black Female Artists

At No. 9 Cork Street in Mayfair, where two splendid red brick townhouses make up Frieze’s only permanent exhibition space, 15 Black female artists have filled a gallery with their work. 

“Manifold,” a group show conceived and independently organized by curator Faridah Folawiyo, is now in its second iteration, following a presentation last November in London’s Soho neighborhood. Then as now, it was inspired by notions of abundance and synthesis; by the power of people and things coming together. 

Writing a review of “Life Between Islands,” a recent survey of British-Caribbean art at Tate Britain, got Folawiyo—whose early years were divided between London and Lagos—mulling the expansive relationship that art from the African diaspora can have with time. “The past, the present, and the future are all very intertwined” in much of that work, she says. “And so I was just thinking about these ideas of layers and multiplicity and artists that work in that manner.” 

As Folawiyo’s channelled that theme into dedicated show, the people that she most wanted to engage all happened to be women. “Obviously I have a personal bias as a Black woman, but it just became this thing,” she says. Besides, the curatorial endeavors of Lubaina Himid, who mounted a series of London exhibitions centering female artists of color in the 1980s, presented a compelling precedent. “What does it mean to have all these works in conversation with each other?” Folawiyo muses. “That’s where the name ‘Manifold’ came from, as well. It’s about celebrating the variety of talent amongst this community, and giving them the space to experiment and to express themselves and to be as free within their practices as possible.” 

For the exhibition last fall, Folawiyo invited Turiya Adkins, Chinaza Agbor, Oluwatobiloba Ajayi, Ayo Akingbade, Ayoade Bamgboye, Dana Cavigny, Eva Diallo, Helena Foster, Daëna Ladéesse, Olukemi Lijadu, Emmanuelle Loca-Gisquet, Fadekemi Ogunsanya, Isabel Okoro, Irene Antonia Diane Reece, and Agnes Waruguru to participate—a group of 15 young and emerging artists (several, like Folawiyo, with roots in Western Africa), working in sculpture, painting, photography, and collage. She did not so much present a prompt as begin an intimate and open-ended conversation with each of them, often over social media.

“Faridah and I actually met through Instagram,” explains Adkins, who contributed work to both versions of “Manifold.” (Based in New York, she maintains a studio space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, while working as an assistant to Julie Mehretu.) “The main basis [of the show] was that she wanted to have Black women’s creations all in one place, which I really loved.” In the fall, Adkins drew from an ongoing series about track and field athletes, interrogating the ways that American society renders Black people both “invisible and hyper-visible”; in the new show, her work An Old Remorse visualizes the motif of “the veil”—a symbol of racial inequity and oppression—in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.