Masud Olufani, is a New Haven and Atlanta based multidisciplinary artist, and curator whose studio practice is rooted in the discipline of sculpture. He is a graduate of Morehouse College, and The Savannah College of Art and Design where he earned an M.F.A. in sculpture in 2013. Masud has exhibited his work in group and solo shows nationally and internationally. He is a featured artist in the 2024 Dakar Biennale in Senegal. The artist has completed residencies at Yaddo, 701 Contemporary,The Galloway School, the Vermont Studio Center, The Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, and Creative Currents in Portobello, Panama. He is a 2025-26' NXTHVN studio fellow; a 2026 Black Rock Senegal Fellow, and a 2020 South Arts Cross Sector Grant recipient for Elder, a site specific installation created to coincide with the redevelopment of the historic David T. Howard School in Atlanta. Masud is a 2018 Southern Arts Prize State Fellow; a recipient of a 2015 and 2018 Idea Capital Grant; a Southwest Airlines Art and Social Engagement grant; and a recipient of 2015-16’ MOCA GA Working Artist Project Grant.
Statement
Masud Olufani’s multidisciplinary practice interrogates how African American cuisine has served as a modality of constructive resilience, ancestral veneration and cultural cohesion across the diaspora. The artist researches the history of African foods such as tamarind, kola nuts, okra, rice, cassava and others, tracing their journey to the Americas through the corridor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and how their arrival shaped the nascent diet of the "new world."
Through the implementation of a variety of studio practices including ceramics, metal and wood working, drawing and painting, kinetics and audio, the artist creates sculptural works that speak to this history and reposition food production and consumption as an alchemy that satiates the body and the spirit. In this context, nourishment or sustenance, has a double meaning that refers both to the corporeal and the incorporeal–to this world and to “other” worlds. Food is a vessel of history and histories embedded within the okra seed and the meaty flesh of the yam.