Folayemi Wilson

Visual Artist, Scholar from Philadelphia

Folayemi Wilson is an artist, designer, educator, and writer. As an object and image maker, her work celebrates the Black imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination and expresses Afrofuturist concepts of blackness. She holds an MFA in furniture design from the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in art history, theory and criticism, and an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business. She is a co-founder and principal of blkHaUS studios, a socially-focused design studio originally founded in Chicago, now based in Philadelphia. Earlier in her career she founded Studio W, Inc., an editorial design consultancy in New York and the San Francisco Bay area, and worked for clients such as Condé Nast Publications, Time Warner, The New York Times, Essence Communications, Black Entertainment Television (BET), and Williams Sonoma. Her writing and reviews have appeared in NKA, Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Expansions, a publication of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale among others. She has been a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, a two-time recipient of an individual artist grant from the Graham Foundation and received 3Arts awards in 2015 and 2020. Recent commissions include public art for a new CTA station in Chicago, and her work is included in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). An oral history of her practice was featured in Bomb Magazine (2023).

Visit Folayemi’s Original Residency Profile here.

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Website: https://www.fowilson.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fowilson/