Tinuade Oyelowo is a Nigerian American multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn whose practice moves across performance, installation, sculpture, and visual art. Rooted in the reclamation of the Black body, her work explores untold histories through the intersecting lenses of race, gender, political oppression, environmental decline, and class. Working from open ended questions, Oyelowo creates pieces that hold tension, memory, and transformation at once.
She earned a BFA in Theatre with an emphasis in Original Works from Cornish College of the Arts and later received an MFA from Brooklyn College’s PIMA Graduate Program.
Oyelowo has exhibited throughout New York at venues including Trestle Gallery, Clemente Soto Vélez Gallery, Art@Renaissance Gallery, Recession Art Gallery, 7 Dunham Gallery, and Brooklyn Open Studios. She was a 2015 Wassaic Project resident, installation residency at 5 Myles Gallery, and in 2022 presented digital work through the Roots Hotel franchise in Istanbul, Turkey. In October 2024 she was one of 200 selected for the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th Anniversary Exhibition.
Tinuade Oyelowo
Statement
"I believe in the power of visibility as it pertains to the healing of Black people in this country. Influenced by my upbringing in Florida, my work takes objects associated with blackness, those which are perceived as culturally devalued, and restores that value through a variety of disciplines. Using troupes aligned with Black femininity, I challenge cultural idealism.
I want to put into question the phobias, prejudices, and roles American life has placed upon Black femininity — 'the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency.'- bell hooks. By drawing on the materials of my upbringing, I am working to recast the perception of my future into expansive, previously inaccessible, states of being."
Working across disciplines, Oyelowo’s practice reclaims and recontextualizes materials and symbols associated with Blackness, transforming them into sites of visibility, resistance, and healing. Her work resists linear narratives, instead holding space for layered histories and lived experiences shaped by race, gender, and power. Through performance, sculptural forms, and installation, she interrogates cultural assumptions surrounding Black femininity while restoring value to objects and identities historically marginalized or dismissed.
Guided by a commitment to visibility as a pathway to healing, Oyelowo draws from personal memory and materials of her upbringing in Florida. In the artist’s own words, “I want to put into question the phobias, prejudices, and roles American life has placed upon Black femininity. By drawing on the materials of my upbringing, I am working to recast the perception of my future into expansive, previously inaccessible, states of being.”
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