ELEMENTAL: Adama Delphine Fawundu and Hong Hong
May 8 - June 18, 2022

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 8, 2-5 PM

Brooklyn, NY (April 14, 2022) — Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents a two-person exhibition ELEMENTAL: Adama Delphine Fawundu and Hong Hong, curated by artist and OyG co-director Leeza Meksin. The works in the show explore ancestral histories and myths, diaspora and the role that the elements play in the creation of art. Opening May 8, 2022, and running through June 18, 2022, the exhibition features a large-scale paper-pulp painting installation by Hong Hong and new paper/textile and video works by Adama Delphine Fawundu.

Born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa, Fawundu draws on her ancestral heritage evoking resistance through spiritualism and mysticism while contending with issues of forced diaspora, dispossession and longing. Hong, who was born in Hefei, Anhui, China and immigrated to the United States at the age of ten, sees her process of working outdoors on large paper pours as a way of communing through time and space with her ancestors and with the world at large. Embodying the power of nature and the idea of landscape as a body, both artists work on sites that are meaningful in terms of their process and family histories. Healing through art and the construction of new self-determined narratives are at the center of Fawundu’s practice, while Hong collaborates with weather and the elements to create her monumental paper pulp paintings.

An opening reception with the artists will take place on Sunday, May 8, 2-5 PM, concurrently with an opening reception for a site-specific installation in the Skirt: Weakness Against the Silence by Zhenya Plechkina in collaboration with Misha Sklar vydavy sindikat, curated by artist and OyG co-director Zahar Vaks. 

For more information, please contact Leeza Meksin or Zahar Vaks at oygprojects@gmail.com, or visit www.oygprojects.com/upcoming

Artists Bios
Adama Delphine Fawundu
Born in 1971 in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa, Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and interdisciplinary visual artist working in printmaking, video, sound and assemblage. With over fifteen years experience working as a photographer, Fawundu completed her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2018. Fawundu co-founded and independently published the sold-out book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora.  The critically acclaimed book MFON led Fawundu on a book tour which included talks at The Tate Modern, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harvard University amongst many other institutions. The book is in numerous libraries around the world including, The Victoria & Albert Museum, Columbia University, The International Center of Photography, and Harvard University.

Fawundu was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, named OkayAfrica’s 100 Women making an impact on Africa and its Diaspora and included in the Royal Photographic Society’s (UK) Hundred Heroines, in 2018. Fawundu’s awards also include, New York Foundation of the Arts Photography Fellow, Brooklyn Art Council Grant, Open Society Foundation Community Fellow, the Brooklyn Historical Society Community Initiative Grant, BRIC Workspace Artist-in-Residence and she is currently an artist-in-residence at the Center for Book Arts. Fawundu has exhibited internationally, with two solo shows in 2019 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and Crush Curatorial gallery in Chelsea, NYC. Fawundu’s works have been reviewed in publications and media outlets such as Time Magazine, The New York Times, Surface Magazine, Leica Fotografie International, Vogue Online, The Washington Post, Dazed Digital, Arise TV, and the BBC World. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University. 

Hong Hong 
Born in 1989 in Hefei, Anhui, China, Hong Hong earned her BFA from State University of New York at Potsdam (2011) and MFA from University of Georgia (2014). Since 2015, she has traveled to faraway and distinct locations across the US to create site-responsive, monumental paperworks. In this nomadic practice, traditional methods of Chinese papermaking coalesces with painting, monastic rituals, and feminist performances. Hong’s research investigates the voyages of bodies, both plant and human, across borders and in time. Recent projects map interstitial relationships between globalization, climate, exile and the Chinese Diaspora through cartographic, symbolic and material languages. 

Hong’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Ringling Museum of Art, Real Art Ways, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Asia Society Texas Center, Georgia Museum of Art, Penland School of Crafts, Lawndale Art Center, Jewett Art Center, University of Texas at Dallas, McClain Gallery, and Ortega Y Gasset Projects. She has also been commissioned to create site-responsive projects by the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University, Art League Houston, NXTHVN and Artspace New Haven. These projects have been reviewed in Art21, Art New England, Southwest Contemporary, Hand Papermaking, Glasstire, and Two Coats of Paint. Hong is the recipient of grants and fellowships at NEA (2019), FCA (2015, 2021), MacDowell (2020), Yaddo (2019), McColl Center for Art and Innovation (2022), Greater Hartford Arts Council (2015), Vermont Studio Center (2019), I-Park (2019), Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2020 - 2021), and Connecticut Office of the Arts (2019). Hong currently lives in Boston, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Endicott College.

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Curator Bio
Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, public art and multiples. Born in the former Soviet Union to Ukrainian Ashkenazi and Uzbek Bukharian parents, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1989. Her work investigates parallels between conventions of painting, architecture and our bodies. In 2015 Meksin received the emerging artist grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and in 2021 she was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work. In 2019 Meksin was the artist in residence at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Her work has been featured in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Chicago Tribune, and The Village Voice, among other publications. 

In 2013 Meksin co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects which she continues to co-direct. Meksin has curated numerous shows for OyG and beyond, including Dyeing, Merging, Multitasking, 2013; Tightened, As If by Pliers, co-curated with Joshua Bienko at The Knockdown Center, 2014; Victoria Lomasko: Unwanted Women, 2017, co-curated with Bela Shayevich and reviewed in Art in America and The New Yorker; SPINE, 2018, co-curated with Suzanne McClelland and reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail;  In 2015 Meksin spearheaded the creation of The Skirt, an OyG space dedicated to site-specific installation. Meksin received a MFA from The Yale School of Art, a BFA from The School of the Art Institute  of Chicago, and a Joint BA/MA from The University of Chicago. In 2021 she joined the faculty at Cornell University in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP).