Artist Statement

Keshad Adeniyi is a figurative and collage-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice moves across painting and sound to examine how belief, orientation, and resistance are formed through lived conditions. His work considers Black life not only as subject, but as a site of ongoing formation—where memory, environment, and power quietly shape how one moves through the world.

Rooted in a personal history marked by systemic neglect and the generational aftermath of the crack epidemic, Adeniyi’s practice emerges from a household structured around survival rather than ideology. Early encounters with race, authority, care, and threat were absorbed through proximity and repetition, not instruction. Family history operates less as narrative content than as connective tissue, informing how experience accumulates and how beliefs form that may later exist in tension with the state or dominant narratives.

Rather than illustrating political positions, Adeniyi’s work attends to the conditions that produce them. Foundational to his visual practice are memories of moments that did not register as political at the time, but which later revealed their influence on his ideological formation. His paintings operate through layering, interruption, and restraint, treating the image as a space where meaning is assembled gradually rather than delivered at once. Domestic, civic, and institutional environments recur not as backdrops, but as formative pressures—often invisible to those outside their reach, yet acutely felt by communities navigating precarity and surveillance.

His audio works draw from historical practices of hip hop—particularly its use of voice, repetition, sampling, and cadence as tools for orientation rather than spectacle. Language is treated as material, grounded in personal memory and historical truths of the Black experience. Through rap, Adeniyi recounts fragments and moments not to assert clarity, but to arrive at it—to understand how the conditions and images raised in his paintings continue to inform who he is in the present.

Rapping functions as a method of learning. Memory is spoken, tested, and repeated, allowing meaning to surface unevenly over time. These works resist narrative closure, treating sound as a space where belief is worked through rather than performed. Past and present collapse, positioning memory as an active force shaping self-understanding and political consciousness.

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 this framework, 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 examine how political consciousness forms unevenly—through repetition, exposure, and time—rather than through singular moments of awakening.

Bio 

Keshad Adeniyi is a multidisciplinary artist from Watts, California, 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.

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) and is a former Create Change Artist-in-Residence for The Laundromat Project where he advanced the role of art as a vital space for liberation, memory, and (re)imagination. 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.