Release+Reframe: Ancestral Aesthetics, Collective Elevation (Nov. 20, 2019)

With this ethos, Eniola Dawodu shared her creative research and explorations across costume, garment, and sculpture. Moved to release boundaries and reframe her practice with intention and attention to materiality rooted in the ancestral, she speaks to the narrative potency of ancestral African dress practices and the cultural significance of honoring one's personal truth.

Dawodu delivered a lecture in 195 Alumni Arena followed by a reception in 190 Alumni Arena. 

Eniola Dawodu is a British-born Nigerian based between Dakar, Senegal and Brooklyn, NY. She is engaged in the cultural archiving of memories, methods, and magic concerning West African textiles and aesthetics of style + self-presentation. Her research and creative practice privilege traditional dress practice, its motif and methodology, as potent conduits for cross-generational communication, situated in the liminal and powerfully charged with legacy and history. With reverence to foremothers, Dawodu reimagines garments of power as masques within which space is held for the latent narratives of ancestral African experiences. In alliance with master artisans via ancient techniques, past and present-day collapse into cross-dimensional expression. Woven memoirs unite; a foundation upon which truths are embroidered.