Yoruba Adire Techniques with Indigo

Photo: Batik with indigo textile design by Gasali Adeyemo, 2019. Photo credit: Inga Hendrickson 

Join us at Bryn Mawr College’s beautiful campus for a special week-long workshop with artist Gasali Adeyemo. Delve into ancestral textile traditions that embrace contemporary fashions and unravel the mythology, beauty, and techniques of Yoruba textiles. Participants will learn how to create an array of fabric samples, including the following resist patterning techniques on cloth: adire alabela (hot wax), adire eleko (casava paste), and adire oniko (stitching with raffia), and then dye their samples in a rich blue indigo vat prepared by natural fermentation. 

Gasali Adeyemo is from a rural village, Ofatedo, located in Osun State Nigeria. From a young age, he realized his artistic potential and spent time sketching for commission and working on village farms to provide income to complete his academic education. In 1990, he discovered the Nike Center for Arts and Culture, Osogbo, Nigeria. He apprenticed there for many years mastering traditional Yoruba textile arts and devoting time to teaching incoming students. Over the years, the popularity of the Nike Center attracted people from all over the world to study and enrich their understanding of the arts and culture of the Yoruba people. Adeyemo’s long years of service to the Nike Center paid off, his artwork gained notoriety, and soon he was traveling and exhibiting around the world sharing the arts and culture of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. He currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.