Bereket Adamu

Bereket Adamu is a multidisciplinary artist from The Southern Peoples Nations of Ethiopia. Adamu’s work concentrates on the complexity of African voices, symbology, and relationship structures to give abstracted immersive imagery to everyday life and the roles we may play. They use their own unique experiences as a displaced migrant to share stories and perspectives that are often left unknown. Working in oil on stretched canvas, hand-tufted rugs, moving images, haunting repetitive soundscapes, large-scale murals, printmaking, and digital illustration. Bereket’s work continues to be anti-disciplinary, never limited by genre or medium. Instead it is largely driven and threaded together through color and narrative.

Throughout African history, there have been atrocities plaguing the continent and the people born to it. Bereket aims to create striking visuals from stories of displacement, greed, anger, immense terror. Yet, instead of focusing on the evil and greed that propel this damage, she is here to offer a dissectible lens for all that happens in between; the beauty in spite of, the resilience that beauty represents, and even the remarkable joy that can come out of collective pain. Remembering this can spark righteous healing and constantly helps to move forward and dream of better futures. When we think about the gaps and holes in ourselves that are in need of mending, Bereket urges us to look back. “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten”.

Bereket Adamu has had the honor of showing her work in galleries including The Walker Art Center, SAIC, New Rules, Light Box Studio, White Pages Gallery, Vine Arts Center, Modest, NE Sculpture Gallery, Juxtaposition Arts, The 701, Burn Something Collective, Vine Arts center, and in large sale murals on the streets of the Twin Cities. Adamu also has vast experience creating commercial art for clients like BMO Harris Bank, MSP Airport, SRF Harris, Target, Red-well Housing, Metro Transit, First Avenue, House of charity, and Juxtaposition Arts.