pẹlẹ o – Ifedolapo Ayewale

pẹlẹ o
Ifedolapo Ayewale

2025 Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award Recipient

Ifedolapo Ayewale (they/them) is a Nashville-based multimedia installation artist whose work focuses on deconstructing and rewriting communication as a medium. Explored through their video work, photography, fashion, and performance, Ifedolapo pulls from both sociocultural and art historical roots, examining the intersection between their first-generation Nigerian heritage, American expectations, and queer identity.

With emphasis on design as a language, Ifedolapo leverages their time as a brand developer against past gallery experience to create organic, intentional work that bends established social rules to birth new understandings.

About the installation:

Ayewale’s installation pẹlẹ o is corridor of padded walls channeling the viewer to step into a path that widens and constricts the space around the body – guiding individuals illuminated by three monitors and surrounding them with sound. At its center, a white fabric skirt rests on a bed of soil.

Their work explores identity as a first-generation Nigerian, American expectations, and queerness. In their own words, Ayewale writes:

“In my current stage in life, I find myself considering

My Nigerian heritage and American southern upbringing, and how each culture (when mixed) can exacerbate the worst qualities of the other. Pride fought off only with more pride.

My queer identity, which has always been with me but has only now found itself secure enough to present to others. I wonder what changed.

The “other”. The non-binary, the third option, how my own experience was geared to that of the median person (when, in America at least, I am not that median person.)
My memory, which seems to be rapidly deteriorating, as my grandfather and his mother before him. What can I learn from what I have left? Where does my nurture solidify into my nature, and what yet liquid pieces can still be shifted around?”

The installation: