Artist Statement

Keshad Adeniyi is a figurative and collage-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice interweaves visual and sonic elements to examine resistance, memory, and Black life. Working across painting and audio, Adeniyi constructs layered environments that consider how lived experience shapes perception, belief, and orientation within the world.

Rooted in a personal history shaped by systemic neglect and the generational aftermath of the crack epidemic, Adeniyi’s work emerges from a household oriented around survival. Early experiences were defined less by articulated political frameworks than by circumstance—where questions of race, power, and belonging were absorbed through proximity to danger, care, and contradiction. Family history functions as connective tissue rather than subject, offering one entry point into how experience accumulates and how people come to hold beliefs that may later exist in tension with the state, the status quo, or dominant ideological narratives.

Rather than illustrating ideology, Adeniyi’s practice attends to the conditions that produce it. His paintings and audio works consider how environments—social, domestic, civic, and institutional—operate as sites of formation. Meaning emerges through repetition, proximity, and endurance; it is often quiet and unannounced, yet forceful in its consequences. These processes remain largely invisible to those unaffected by their pressure, while operating with particular intensity for communities navigating precarity, surveillance, and threat.

The audio works function as parallel sites of inquiry rather than accompaniment or illustration. Constructed through voice, repetition, and accumulation, they treat language as material rather than message. Sound operates as presence—sometimes declarative, sometimes withheld—allowing belief, doubt, and orientation to surface gradually. Meaning is shaped through duration and restraint rather than narrative resolution.

Central to Adeniyi’s broader practice is A Note From The Field, an ongoing exhibition platform that brings visual and audio work into dialogue with community-centered engagement. Across these efforts, his work remains focused on how systems quietly shape ways of seeing, moving, and responding—suggesting that resistance is less a declared stance than a consequence of lived conditions.

Through a practice that is both archival and expressive, Adeniyi reclaims visual and sonic space to articulate narratives that are deeply personal yet broadly structural. His work proposes that becoming political is not an event or announcement, but a process—formed unevenly, often silently, and over time, in the wake of one’s experiences.

Bio 

Keshad Adeniyi is a multidisciplinary artist from Watts, California, whose practice seamlessly integrates figurative painting, collage, and original audio compositions—including rap—to investigate themes of Black liberation, resistance, and healing within an abolitionist framework. His work inhabits a dynamic intersection of visual and sonic mediums, creating immersive and interdisciplinary experiences that challenge dominant narratives and provoke critical reflection.

Adeniyi’s commitment to transformative justice is deeply informed by extensive experience programming within carceral institutions, both domestically and internationally. This vital engagement culminated in the establishment of The Field, an organization he created to leverage the arts as a source of socio-political education, healing, and community building. One of the core programs of The Field is The Story From Within (TSFW), which uses storytelling as a transformative healing modality to help reawaken parts of oneself that have been silenced by state violence—specifically the violence embedded in education, incarceration, and the criminal legal system.

At the heart of TSFW is the use of creative expression as a method for pedagogical engagement. By leveraging artists, activists, and advocates, TSFW creates entry points for discussions around identity, material conditions, community, and other sociopolitical topics shaping the experiences of the students served. Through engagement with music, reading excerpts, visuals, and other forms of art, students develop skills in using various artistic mediums for self-expression, self-regulation, and healing. This interdisciplinary and immersive approach fosters spaces for critical reflection and collective care.

Adeniyi holds a Master of Arts in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University (NYU). He currently serves as Director of Education and Curriculum Development at exalt youth in Manhattan, an organization dedicated to supporting young people impacted by the criminal legal system. Currently he is a Create Change Artist-in-Residence at The Laundromat Project, where he continues to advance the role of art as a vital space for liberation, memory, and (re)imagination.