ADELE YISEOL KENWORTHY
Adele Yiseol Kentworthy is a socially engaged artist organizer who creates botanical interventions in public spaces. She explores how flowers have dyed, draped, and nourished social movements and daily reimagines what it means for socially engaged art to exist as collective liberation through self and community care. Adele is currently exploring what it means to cultivate a dialogue that includes the reframing and recontextualization of Asian American artists and the colonized histories of their motherlands, and navigating ways for AAPI artists to openly investigate those inherited legacies in their own art practices. She co-founded the DMV Korean American Womxn Artists Collective with artist Christina Young, co-founded the Eco-Art Initiative with artist Jordana Rubenstein-Edberg, and was selected to be among WomenPhotograph’s first BIPOC visual storytellers open call in 2021. In 2022, Adele earned her MFA in Social Practice Art with an emphasis on public policy at the Corcoran School of Art & Design at George Washington University.
what is something you always wish i asked and knew about you, 2023
Photographs, dried flowers, found objects
My practice dwells in the void filled by collective memories left in the wake of silence.
Interweaving the fading practice of 꽃꽂이, floral arranging in Korea, erased during occupation and war—to reclaim and reimagine inheritance and to counter memory existing in public spaces.
When my hands are in flowers, I think of my lost family left behind when my paternal grandfather fled the north before the war; my maternal grandmother who was in an arranged marriage to reduce her chance of becoming a comfort woman; my mother-in-law who saw her mother’s generation arrange flowers as part of the daily life she watched disappear as she grew older.
The living sculptures made in community with others exist to bear witness to the remnants of our shared humanity and to flood all the silences between generations with those memories.
