'Praise House' Book Launch: In Conversation with Adama Delphine Fawundu and Curator, Mistura Allison

Date: April 7, 2026
Time: 6:00pm-7:30pm ET
Location: Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Photography & Imaging, Riese Lounge, 1st Floor

Overview: 

Building on the notion of ‘praise,’ Adama Delphine Fawundu frames this book as a celebration of life. She honors the stories whisperedto her by her mother; she adorns her body in her grandmother’s textile work; she elevates the memory of various named and unnamed Black women of the diaspora and documents the iconic small Civil War era styled white wooded praise house on a patch of land off the side of a road in South Carolina not far from Beaufort creating an intimate body of work of color photography of an interconnected history.

This book about female figures—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, artists, caregivers, storytellers, and cooks—explores a range of emotions that consume us about family life and history. It is both an art book and a memoir. 

Speakers:

Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY of Mende, Bubi, and Krim descent. Through photography, video, textile-based sculptural forms, and performance, she creates embodied entities inspired by Indigenous knowledge systems and spiritual retentions across time and space. She co-authored the book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Mistura Allison is a researcher, curator and art historian. She is the founder of ashikọ, a visually driven research platform inspired by Africa and its Diaspora. Currently, she serves as Curator and Project Coordinator at Villa Romana in Florence, engaging in transnational artistic practices with a focus in contemporary art and advancing methodologies of decentralised exhibition-making. Her work focuses on research-based practices engaging with the plurality of contemporary Diasporic visual and oral productions. She is part of the curatorial collective at Archive Ensemble, where she co-curates the programme Publishing Practices.