Anthony Akinbola

Anthony Akinbola (born 1991, in Columbia, Missouri) is a Nigerian-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Black identity, commodity culture, abstraction, and the social meanings embedded in everyday materials associated with Black life. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and found-object assemblage, Akinbola examines self-fashioning, commercial circulation, and cultural value through durags, pomade cans, barbershop imagery, and other objects that carry both intimate and political resonance.  Akinbola received a B.A. in communications and media from SUNY Purchase College. Raised between the United States and Nigeria, he often engages Black hair culture, consumer goods, and material signifiers of diasporic experience, using repetition, stitching, accumulation, and acts of transformation to consider how identity is shaped through commerce, ritual, display, and everyday use. His work frequently moves between sculpture and painting, reimagining familiar objects as formal and conceptual devices that speak to Black individuation, joy, fetishization, and the politics of visibility.  His work has been exhibited at the SCAD Museum of Art, Sean Kelly, Night Gallery, Galerie Krinzinger, Carbon 12, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and the Queens Museum, and has appeared in group exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art. His work is held in the Guggenheim Museum’s permanent collection and the Zabludowicz Collection. Anthony Akinbola lives and works in New York.