Collection Council selects work by Adebunmi Gbadebo for 2025-2026 acquisition

EVANSTON, IL.- The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University announces the acquisition of Many Mornings Later (2025–26) by American artist Adebunmi Gbadebo, whose work is currently featured in the 2026 Venice Biennale. The large-scale handmade paper work was selected by The Block’s 2025–26 Collection Council, a group of donors whose contributions support the growth and care of the museum’s collection.

Throughout the academic year, Council members participate in a collaborative process of learning, research, and discussion with artists and curators. Working within the year’s theme of abstraction, the Council considered a shortlist of artists nominated by members and The Block’s curatorial team before reaching consensus on Many Mornings Later and recommending it to the museum’s Acquisitions Committee.

“The Collection Council was fortunate to discover, learn, and discuss the work of several artists, all of whom expanded our understanding of abstract art,” said Kim Allen-Niesen (’16, ’19 P), chair of The Block’s Collection Council. “We realized Gbadebo’s ability to include her personal history within her abstraction was special. We are thrilled to add Many Mornings Later to The Block collection.”

Many Mornings Later explores the ability of materials to hold and communicate histories through transformations of their physical state. The large-scale handmade paper work incorporates cotton and soil from True Blue Plantation in South Carolina, where Gbadebo’s maternal ancestors were enslaved and where members of her family are buried, alongside human hair collected from Harlem barbershops, indigo, clay, mica, periwinkle, and other organic materials.

In the work swirls of blue, white, and green are punctuated by human hair, cotton seeds, and other matter embedded directly within the paper. Gbadebo pigments the cotton fibers themselves and compresses the sheets under an 11-ton hydraulic press, producing works that she considers sculptural rather than simply works on paper. Suspended for display, the sheet can be viewed from both the front and back, revealing variations in color, texture, and depth that develop as the materials settle during the papermaking process.

“I am excited that The Block’s Collection Council has selected Adebunmi Gbadebo’s large-scale handmade paper work Many Mornings Later for our collection,” said Kyle Stephan, The Block’s Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “Gbadebo is at the forefront of material innovation in contemporary art, utilizing organic materials such as cotton, soil from former plantations, and collected human hair as archival sources to document, preserve, and care for the lives and memories of her enslaved ancestors. Offering considerable interdisciplinary teaching potential, Many Mornings Later reinforces The Block’s commitment to rigorous formal experimentation and engagement with untold or underrepresented histories.”

Gbadebo’s use of these materials grew out of research into her family’s history at True Blue Plantation. Her earlier handmade paper works incorporated archival records created by enslavers, including appraisal lists and documents that recorded enslaved people as property. Over time, she began looking instead to the physical land as another form of archive.

“There is information, there is history, there are bodies, there’s a spirit that is in this soil,” Gbadebo told members of The Block’s Collection Council during a virtual studio visit in April. She described the shift toward soil and other organic materials as a way to address histories of enslavement without continually reproducing the violence embedded in surviving written records.

The work also reflects connections between African American histories and West African material traditions. In speaking with the Council, Gbadebo described how her research into the cultivation of indigo and rice in South Carolina led her to histories of skilled agricultural knowledge brought from West Africa through the transatlantic slave trade. Her practice also draws on Nigerian and Cameroonian ceramic traditions and the long history of indigo dyeing in West Africa.

Many Mornings Later belongs to the body of work Gbadebo developed for the 2026 Venice Biennale, where related large-scale paper works and ceramic sculptures are currently on view. The international presentation brings together many of the materials and processes that have shaped her practice, including soil, clay, cotton, hair, indigo, and techniques rooted in both African and African American histories.

The Collection Council acquisition joins another work by Gbadebo acquired by The Block in 2026. Periwinkle, a print created with Highpoint Editions, entered the collection separately. Combining cyanotype, screenprint, photolithography, and inks created with soil and indigo, the work layers images of the cemetery at True Blue Plantation with the silhouettes of periwinkle plants. Gbadebo has described periwinkle, which grows throughout the burial ground, as an unofficial grave marker that can signal what lies beneath the earth.

Together, Many Mornings Later and Periwinkle offer multiple points of entry into Gbadebo’s practice and create opportunities for teaching and research across American Studies, Art History, Art, Theory, and Practice, African American Studies, History, Religion, material studies, and the sciences.