salt 17: Adama Delphine Fawundu
On View through June 14, 2026 at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) on the University of Utah campus, will feature Adama Delphine Fawundu in the 17th iteration of its salt series, on view as of September 13, 2025. The UMFA’s salt series showcases work by emerging artists from around the world with a goal to reflect the global impact of contemporary art today.
Fawundu is a New York-based artist of Mende, Krim, Bamileke, and Bubi descent. For the work in salt 17: Adama Delphine Fawundu the artist chose objects from the UMFA’s African art collection to display alongside her “kpoto patchwok” pieces, a process named for a combination of the Mende word for gathering fruits and nuts for communal nourishment (kpoto) and the Krio word for piecing together textiles (patchwok). For the exhibition’s assemblage-like works Fawundu used materials from Congo, Brazil, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Malta, Cuba, and the United States. Fawundu states that her practice embodies ancestral memory across space and time, reconnecting places, objects, plants, animals, and spirits of the global African diaspora.
“The salt series has always offered an opportunity for artists to engage with and intervene in the Museum’s global collection. When Adama first reached out to me, she was interested in learning more about our African art collection that has been at the UMFA since the 1980s and has its own challenging history,” says Emily Lawhead, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the UMFA. “This collaboration blossomed into salt 17, and I am honored to partner with this incredible artist to bring her work to life alongside the objects she selected from our collection.” She continued.
In addition to the exhibition in the UMFA’s salt gallery, Fawundu created “Vibrations from the deep” a two-channel film that will play continuously in the Museum’s Black Box. Of the film curator Yvonne Mpwo says in her essay for the exhibition, “Who gets to speak for or through these masks and objects? Yet, even while separated from their cultural objects, the Black diaspora is connected through ritual and body memory. Black performance and embodied expression is itself an archive. Fawundu speaks to this in the video, Vibrations from the deep, which was shot in Nigeria, Congo, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Cuba, Brazil and the United States (South Carolina, Utah, and Georgia). Displayed in the black box near the salt gallery, the two-channel video acts as a mirrored, synchronic diptych of diasporic psychometry.”
salt 17 is presented concurrently with the artist’s features in the Congo Biennale in Kinshasa and the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an essay by Yvonne Mpwo, Independent Curator and bana’pwo Founder.
Fawundu will present on her work during a free artist’s talk at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on Wednesday, September 24 at 6:00 p.m. The public is invited to a free celebration on Friday, September 26, at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts honoring the opening of salt 17 and Relative Truths, the UMFA’s concurrent exhibition featuring the faculty artists from the University of Utah.
salt 17's Curatorial Sponsor is Erica and Ben Dahl and is funded in part by the Joseph and Evelyn Rosenblatt Enrichment Fund.
Read the salt 17 publication below:
salt 17: Adama Delphine Fawundu Digital Catalogue.pdf
PDF 24 MB
Adama Delphine Fawundu, detail of Kala Sun. Sun of Vitality #3: Ode to the Great Salt Lake, 2025. Hand-printed silver gelatin print with mabele chalk, charcoal, acrylic paint, copper, and archival pigment on silk textile. 20 x 16 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Adama Delphine Fawundu, Sîmba #1: feet grounded in the earth’s deep core, head crowned by a galaxy of stars—she sees: you are me, I am you, we are countless, yet one, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
Adama Delphine Fawundu, Vibrations from the deep (stills), 2025. Two-channel HD video, filmed in Nigeria, Congo, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Malta, Cuba, Brazil, and the United States (South Carolina, Utah, Georgia, and Maine). 7 minutes 56 seconds. Images courtesy of the artist.
Adama Delphine Fawundu, Sîmba #2: we blood, air, and water—recycled through time’s endless loop. hear the rhythm. step forward—for all who came and all to come, 2025. Archival pigment, cyanotypes, acrylic paint, kalaba (kaolin), and mabele chalk on cotton canvas. Antique quilt from Salt Lake City. Handmade banana leaf with jute pulp paper. Healing herbs, Kuba cloth, and raffia from Congo, Brazil, and Sierra Leone. Copper from Ghana. Salt from Great Salt Lake. Cobalt blue glass bottles, palm fibers, and calabash from Congo and Brazil. Clay beads from Bahia. Cowrie shells from Brazil, Nigeria, Congo, Sierra Leone. Turkey and pheasant feathers. Elements of water, wind, and sunshine from Kinshasa, Congo; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Salt Lake City, Utah; Bahia, Brazil; and Lagos, Nigeria. 74 x 99 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
