modupeola

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery presents “Also What Are We Wearing”

                                                                                                       A Solo Exhibition by Modupeola Fadugba in West Palm Beach

                                                                                                                                        Nov 1st - Nov 29th, 2025

Drumbeats reverberating through a crowd, a dazzle of color, the jangle of beads and high-stepping hooves. Also, What Are We Wearing, Modupeola Fadugba’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde West Palm Beach, transports us to the Ojude Oba festival, a riotous annual celebration of Yoruba heritage, honoring the Awujale, the paramount ruler of the Ijebu people. Known for its elaborate equestrian processions, resplendent attire, and communal traditions, the festival is a vibrant, bustling occasion. Fadugba, however, turns her attention to what happens before the spectacle: the intimate acts of preparation that shape the festival’s unfolding. What happens before we step into the public eye? How do the choices we make reflect our identities and heritage? 

As in her earlier work with swimmers, this latest body of work emerges from site-specific cultural research. Fadugba spent time in Yorubaland, living and working among local artisans – tailors, beadworkers, saddle makers – learning not only how objects are made but how these practices are bound up in histories, identities, and place. Though these people may never ride in the parade, their labor is inseparable from its beauty. An intricately beaded saddle floating in a mottled surface – Fadugba’s signature burnt raw canvas – pays tribute to their stories by not only holding up the saddle as an object to be admired and studied on its own terms, but as part of an ongoing and evolving creative process, one that is as fragile as it is transformative.

The beadwork as seen in this exhibition is the result of the artist seeking out mentorship: as a way of not just expanding her own practice, but also of embedding herself within the artisanal communities she depicts. Working closely with a self-trained textile and bead artist, Fadugba uses beads not just as decoration but as material, surface, and symbolism. In Head to the Dressing Room, the horse’s body is composed entirely of beads that ripple and swirl, evoking the movement of muscle while also highlighting the central role played by these animals within the festival. Elsewhere, in Agbada Men II – a work depicting a sea of figures wearing identical green outfits, a nod to the concept of asoebi (coordinated attire worn by groups as a principle of collectivity, repetition, and identity) – the beads become the frame. Here, they serve to contain, unify, and elevate the image, but the boundary is also unsettled by patches of burnt canvas and by a fringe of loosely hanging beads, again suggesting notions of precarity and change.

In this way, Fadugba resists fixedness: her interest lies less in documenting objects or events than in capturing the lived, embodied experience of tradition in motion. Faces are abstracted, canvases charred, forms fluid. Every saddle, garment, and bead carries traces of hands, histories, and cultural memory, linking past and present in a living tradition. In encountering these works, we glimpse the care that precedes performance and the beauty that emerges from preparation, inviting reflection on what it means to belong and to carry tradition forward.

Description

In Pink Socks, Fadugba stages an equestrian figure cloaked in the ceremonial grandeur of agbada robes, poised atop a vivid pink horse that seems to shimmer between motion and stillness. The composition pulses with layered hues, crimson, ochre, and deep plum, while scorched voids ripple across the surface like memory’s interruptions. A beaded fringe frames the work, suggesting both regality and fragility, while the rider’s facelessness resists singular identity, allowing the figure to stand as a vessel for collective tradition. This work draws on the Ojude Oba festival visual spectacle but pauses the procession mid-stride, turning its pageantry inward. Beads serve here as both ornament and anchor: markers of prestige that also tether the fleeting spectacle to a lineage of slow, exacting craft.

Description

Bead and Bronze, Reframed recontextualizes a historic equestrian figure from the Benin Museum, placing it against a pale blue field scarred by burns and punctuated with traces of gold. The figure, rendered in bronze tones, appears both monumental and spectral. By isolating this object from its museological frame and embedding it within her own material language, Fadugba interrogates how heritage is preserved, displayed, and consumed. The beaded border and scalloped fringe invoke Yoruba ceremonial aesthetics, positioning the work at the threshold between archive and performance. Here, beading functions not as ornament but as a temporal seam—binding ancestral legacy to contemporary authorship.

Description
This work presents a fully beaded horse, rendered with obsessive precision, standing against a background visibly burned and scarred. The contrast between the delicate, almost devotional labor of the beadwork and the violence suggested by the scorched surface creates a charged tension. Beading here is not ornament, but rather, it is endurance and structure. Each bead holds the rhythm of craft traditions often dismissed or feminized, and repositions them as forms of presence. The horse, a symbol of prestige and public display, is reframed through this painstaking surface, not just dressed, but armored in care. In the face of fire, fragmentation, or erasure, the integrity of the craft holds. What is assembled bead by bead refuses to be undone.

Description

In Looking For A Coral Unicorn, two riders emerge atop magenta and coral horses, their forms suspended between presence and dissolution. The surface bears traces of burning, staining, and layered mark-making, echoing the unfinished processes of tailoring, dyeing, and beadwork that precede the Ojude Oba festival. The work foregrounds the cultural labor behind spectacle, while the coral hue anchors the composition in Yoruba regal aesthetics. By staging the riders within a fragmented ecology of color and gesture, the painting reveals the invisible artisanship embedded in communal appearances.