upcoming
Please join me on Monday, December 1st, from 1-2:15pm for this public lecture, RSVP here ->
“Researching Ladi Kwali’s ceramic demonstration tour around the United States in 1972, agwuncha will specifically examine Kwali’s Chicago visit to the Contemporary African Arts Festival at the Field Museum. While these demonstrations outwardly celebrated Kwali’s artistry and cultural significance, they also raised critical questions around authorship, representation, and cultural translation. Through archival material and as an Igbo-American craftsperson and educator, agwuncha reflects on Kwali’s pivotal role in bridging traditional Nigerian pottery techniques to contemporary ceramic practices today.
This event is presented as part of the gallery exhibition Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art on view through December 6, 2025.”
Ladi Kwali demonstrating outside the Field Museum, Chicago, 1972. Courtesy the Field Museum.
I am excited to join the Hyde Park Art Center through the Jackman Goldwasser Residency as part of the 2026 cohort. My intentions with this residency include developing my studio art practice, facilitating ‘woven together’ programning, and continuing my research with local archives as a visitng scholar.
A public program introducing some of the Chicago artists will take place at the Art Center on February 27th at 6 p.m., with agwuncha, Flores, Lewis, and Park.
For those interested in my practice, participating in a ‘woven together’ workshop, or collaboration please email me > eagwun @ gmail.com
news
I was selected for a Teaching Arts, 3Arts Award for 2026!
About 3Arts: “Founded in 1912, with a history centered on women artists, 3Arts is a nonprofit organization that supports artists working in the performing, teaching, and visual arts in the Chicago metropolitan area, including women artists, artists of color, and Deaf or disabled artists. The 3Arts Awards were launched in 2007 to provide unrestricted awards, project funding, residencies, professional development, and promotion to help artists take risks, experiment, and build momentum in their careers over time.”
read the full press release here ->
My work was featured in the Jupiter Benefit Auction 2025 hosted with Artsty.
“Jupiter is delighted to announce its debut benefit auction, titled As Ever, In Orbit, taking place exclusively on Artsy. Spanning painting, sculpture, and photography, the sale gathers 18 artists from across the globe whose work exemplifies the sensibilities we hold dear at Jupiter. They strive, as we name in our mission statement, to not only witness the world shift around them, but to be active architects of the world they wish to inhabit. Those included in this sale harmonize with our clarion call to create conditions that beget more viable writing lives for cultural critics by championing the exigent role writers play in the broader project of transforming the contemporary art world into a site of nurturance for artists across disciplines.”
about the work: soft bind (2025) by artist ebere agwuncha, is a sculptural memory that calls to the igbo technique of binding hair with nylon thread to lengthen it through a protective style; a hairstyle that the artist’s mother would do on her often as a child. The copper thread and woven reed bind to connect with hair (horsehair) at the base of the work.
view the work on Artsy here ->
“A feature of the artist ebere agwuncha who explores the regenerative, spiritual, and communal dimensions of material culture.” take a read of this wonderful essay written by a dear one, camille bacon via Sixty Inches From Center.
“... agwuncha’s artworks are cenobitic praise songs whose rhythm revolves around the Igbo principle of “eliminat[ing] the product and retain[ing] the process so that every occasion and every generation will receive its own impulse and experience of creation.”1 To this end, the sculpture (“the product”) is not satisfied with sitting inert and untouched. Like any alive thing, it calls out for touch, it yearns to be emptied and renewed. Like any reincarnation of history, it tugs on velvet rope to ring the bell of generational rememory. As such, the artist invited all who visited the exhibition to partake in a ritual (“the process”) in which they poured water from the owoko into glasses and offered it to the mound of loam upon which the sculpture was placed. Here, a means of coaxing whispers out from the earth’s core.”
read the full article here ->