“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 is drawn to the elusive and intangible – the slippery and elastic spaces in the insatiable void of memory. These phenomena are explored in the context of Yoruba cosmology and Africanfuturism. Using materials and techniques based in craft, Funlola’s work suggests dream-like and half-remembered spaces, yet sacred.
Exhibitions include the National Ornamental Metal Museum, Brooklyn Metal Works, the Fuller Craft Museum. Awards include a Mass MoCA residency (2023), the Wagner Foundation Artadia Boston Award (2024), Penland Visiting Artist Collective Residency (2025). Coker holds an MFA in Studio Art from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and is currently a resident artist at Boston Center for the Arts.
As the broader umbrella of their work, Slippery Space|s is a convergence of storytelling, language and writing, devotion, and historical research. It is an investigation of liminality through the lens of Yoruba cosmology and Africanfuturism. Within it, Funlola Coker builds immersive installations of objects and sculptures that coordinate with original autobiographical short stories, prose, and poetry.
These sculptures evoke slippery, liminal spaces – dream-like and half-remembered, yet sacred. From a Yoruba perspective, she considers how objects can transport one through time and nostalgia. For them, the act of chiseling, carving, and braiding are connected to memory: digging to reveal, automatic movements of the body connect to shared histories and cultural experiences.
Texture is their foundation and a tether to past experiences. Using objects as a gateway into memories, Coker builds vignettes and tableaus of familiar settings. They incorporate contemporary themes such as Africanfuturism, speculative fiction, and world-building to inform their narrative explorations. Though fictional, their sculptures reference functional objects and serve specific purposes in the slippery space – tools of navigation, devices, and shrines reside in this insatiable void of memory. Objects are crafted in metal – electroformed and fabricated; in stone – chiseled and carved to establish a direct connection to the Yoruba people.
