“The three 2024 Boston Artadia Awardees represent exciting and important voices in the Boston art scene. Engaging urgent topics as varied as water ecosystems, criminal justice, and Yoruba cosmology, these artists deploy materials, language, and cultural traditions to make connections between individual identity and community experience. Each artist draws on their own personal and professional histories to create works of art that speak to our society’s current need for care, joy, and hope.” – juror M. Rachael Arauz, Independent Curator.

Coker is the 2024 Wagner Foundation Artadia Awardee.

Funlola’s work follows research threads in the realm of recollection, imagination, and the surreal. Funlola builds narrative sculptures that call on nostalgic memories and moments of the mundane held dear. Using materials and techniques based in craft, these sculptures suggest dream-like and half-remembered spaces, yet sacred.

As the broader umbrella of Funlola’s work, Slippery Space|s is a convergence of storytelling, language and writing, craft, and historical research. It is an investigation of liminality through the lens of Yoruba cosmology and Africanfuturism. Within it, Funlola builds immersive installations of objects and sculptures that coordinate original autobiographical short stories, prose, and poetry.