Photoshoot featuring textile artist Bukola Koiki
Meet Bukola —
Bukola Koiki is an artist born in Lagos, Nigeria, and immigrated to the United States alone at nineteen. She exists within a lineage of artists who mean to collapse the single story of the West African experience. Her work explores the global immigrant experience by engaging with and interpreting the liminal spaces she inhabits between distinct cultures and identities.
Initially trained in graphic design and advertising, her practice has evolved to include research and study of the ancient craft of textiles and the fine craft of printmaking, video, performance, and more. Koiki’s multidimensional works reflect her material and technical curiosity and include hand-pulled prints rendered with embroidered collagraph plates, giant beads employing Nigerian hair threading techniques, handmade and hand-dyed paper, indigo-dyed and hand-printed Tyvek facsimiles of Nigerian gele head ties, amongst other explorations. She wields these materials as metaphors to explore the Yoruba woman’s body, rites of passage, and immigrant agency through linguistic phenomena, cultural ontologies, generational memory, and more.
Koiki received an MFA in Applied Craft + Design from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and a BFA in Communication Design from the University of North Texas. In 2019, she was named a Shortlist Finalist for the American Craft Council’s Emerging Voices Award, and in 2020 was nominated for the Textile Society of America’s Brandford/Elliott Award. She has participated in residencies at Haystack Studio School, Bates College Arts Collaborative, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, The Hambidge Center, and SPACE Gallery. Koiki and her work have been featured in print in American Craft magazine and Surface Design Journal and online in the Art21 Magazine and Art Practical Journal. She has done interviews with Oregon Public Broadcasting/NPR and the American Craft Podcast. She was the AICAD Teaching Fellow at Maine College of Art from 2017 -2019 and the 2019-2020 Fountainhead Fellow in the Craft/Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2023, she received a Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort grant, awarded to twenty mid-career craft artists who teach and was named a United States Artist Fellow in Craft.
She lives and maintains a studio practice in South Portland, ME.
Instagram: @bukolakoiki
Email: bkoiki@gmail.com
Learn more at: www.bukolakoiki.com
Content Creator: Michael D. Wilson
Driven almost entirely by curiosity Michael D Wilson wants nothing more than to connect with people and show what it is that makes them unique individuals. Michael is passionate about photography and is forever in search of people that are equally as passionate about their lives and work. He always says “The best part about photography is an excuse to meet new people and learn something from them.” After a half-decade of assisting photographer, Martin Schoeller, Michael and his partner settled in Maine. Maine and New England provide endless opportunities for interesting and inspiring assignments as well as potential personal projects.
About Bukola’s current body of work:
“For this work in progress, I am returning to working with gele (Nigerian head ties), which I see as a potent symbol for the women of the Yoruba ethnic group of Nigeria, with whom I was born and raised for too short a time. The gele is worn as a fancy head adornment along with traditional dress during various familial and cultural celebrations such as marriages, funerals, birthday milestones, and religious observances, and it acts as a stand-in for the Yoruba female body in space. The head ties, in all their flexible metallic, paper-meets-cloth-like glory, can be shapeshifted into various pleasing and exaggerated forms that frame and enhance the wearer’s face and status and stand out or blend in, depending on the occasion. This attribute is an excellent metaphor for how a West African woman immigrant to the West has to adapt to new circumstances, languages, and even gender expectations. Along with the gele, I am conducting material explorations with the black rubber thread used for creating elaborate irun kikó (Yoruba hair threading) hairstyles in Nigeria, disassembled Nigerian palm rib brooms known as igbálè in the Yoruba language, and natural earth and lake pigment paints. The Nigerian broom has cultural and domestic significance as a symbol of cleanliness and security. It is also used as a cooking utensil in food preparation in Nigerian traditions. Igbálè also have political symbology as a promise to sweep away corruption, worries, and other national problems. Combined with readings and research into aso ake (Yoruba strip cloth) and chromophobia (fear of and cultural aversion to color), I am slowly weaving my way toward a mixed media visual exploration of our globally omnipresent linguistic and physical violence towards “the other” – immigrants, migrants and the evidence of the violence on the bodies of the many women in these populations whose ingenuity and tenacity attempt to hold transnationally displaced families together.”
2024 Funders:
The 2024 Maine Craft Content Project is generously funded by the Maine Arts Commission & many individual donors. With this funding the Maine Crafts Association provided five Maine craft artists with new online content to support their practices, tell their stories and grow their businesses.
The Maine Crafts Association is a 501(c)(3) which builds upon Maine’s rich craft traditions by nurturing a vibrant, supportive, inclusive craft community with educational programs and resources.
Our ability to accomplish our mission and help artists thrive is reliant on individual contributions.