Remnants/ Relics/ Residue - Salimatu Amabebe - Vest I

Salimatu Amabebe

Vest I, 2023

pewter cast

12 x 7 x 17"

$4,000

Salimatu Amabebe (he/they), is a trans, Nigerian-American chef and multimedia artist, working in food, film, photography, sculpture and installation. His work focuses on the intersection of food and art while centering community activism, African diasporic culinary traditions and Black queer/ trans liberation. Amabebe is the founder/ director of Black Feast - a culinary event celebrating Black artists and writers through food. 

Amabebe’s work has recently been presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Yerba Buena Center for Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, SOMArts,The David Ireland House and CounterPulse. Amabebe is a recipient of The Museum of the African Diaspora's 2023-2024 Emerging Artists Program Award, a 2023 Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, the 2022 Black Immersive Creators Grant and the 2021 Eater New Guard Award. His work has been featured in Vogue, The New York Times and Eater. Amabebe’s work and recipes can be found in A24’s cookbook, Horror Caviar and Klancy Miller’s recent cookbook, For the Culture.

Artist's Statement :
In his recent work from the series, SON, Amabebe uses the repetition of casting to process, reshape and reform memory. Vest I and II are created from casts of the artist’s upper body after top surgery. In order to create these works Amabebe created three separate casts - from plaster, resin and finally, pewter. 
Through casting parts of his body and objects from his childhood home in pewter, Amabebe creates sculptures as a way to externalize or house memory. Even when casting from the same mold, Amabebe encourages the metals and alloys to drip and distort, giving each piece its own unique texture and composition.