Eugene Ofori Agyei Builds a Language of Home, Memory, and Protection

In his upcoming exhibition Fihankra, opening at the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Eugene Ofori Agyei uses clay, wood, textiles, and found objects to explore what it means to belong across borders. Rooted in the Akan Adinkra symbol for security and home, the work reflects a life shaped between Ghana, Togo, and the United States, where identity is continually assembled and renegotiated. Through fragile yet resilient materials, Agyei creates sculptural spaces that hold memory, care, and tension at once—inviting viewers to consider home not as a fixed place, but as something carried, repaired, and reimagined over time.

Hi Eugene, thank you so much for taking the time to share your work and this exciting moment with our readers. We’re thrilled to spotlight your upcoming exhibition Fihankra and dive into the ideas behind it.

Your exhibition Fihankra explores African and Black diasporic identity through sculpture and mixed media rooted in Adinkra symbols from Ghana. What does the concept of “Fihankra” mean to you personally, and how does it frame the story you’re telling through this body of work?
Fihankra is an Akan Adinkra symbol meaning security, protection and home. For me, it speaks to belonging, care, and security but also to the fragility of these states and who gets to experience them. Growing up across the Akan and Ewe community in Ghana, Togo, and the United States, I saw identity as fluid and constantly negotiated.

In the exhibition, this idea of binding extends beyond clay, wood, textiles, and found objects to memory, culture, and diaspora itself. Each piece enacts a negotiation between histories, personal experience, and communal memory. Through Fihankra, I explore how African diasporic identity is never static, it is assembled, disassembled, and reassembled across space and time. The work reflects on holding multiple homes, histories, and selves at once, finding cohesion without erasing tension.

Growing up across Akan and Ewe communities, living in Togo, and later moving to the United States has given you a layered relationship with identity and home. How have these cross-border experiences shaped the way you think about memory, belonging, and cultural negotiation in your art?
These cross-border experiences deeply inform how I think about memory in my work. Memory is not linear or complete, it is layered, fragmented, and sometimes contradictory. In my practice, I approach memory as something that is activated through materials—clay that cracks or holds, fabric that wraps or frays, wood that bears weight. These materials mirror how cultural knowledge is carried across borders, altered by context, yet never erased.

Belonging, for me, exists in tension. Moving between Akan and Ewe traditions, and later navigating Blackness in the United States, made me acutely aware of how identity is read externally as much as it is felt internally. My work responds to this negotiation by resisting singular narratives. Instead, the sculptures function as sites where multiple histories and cultural logics coexist sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in friction.

These experiences have led me to see cultural negotiation not as loss, but as a form of making. The work becomes a space where inherited traditions, diasporic realities, and personal memory are continuously reassembled, acknowledging displacement while insisting on the possibility of care, continuity, and self-definition.

You work with materials like clay, wooden benches, batik fabric, yarn, and found objects to create assemblages that balance fragility and resilience. How do you decide which materials to use, and what role do they play in conveying the emotional weight of the work?
I choose materials for their ability to carry memory, labor, and vulnerability. Clay is foundational in my practice, built using the Akan Ghanaian coiling technique. It records the body’s touch, gestures, and emotions, holding them over time. Its fragility after firing mirrors the precarity of diasporic existence, while its endurance reflects resilience and survival, making clay both witness and archive.

Wooden benches, batik fabric, yarn, and found objects act as social materials. Benches suggest gathering and rest, but they also bear weight, strain, and use; I age them intentionally, letting time shape their surfaces. Batik fabric, tied to West African identity yet shaped by trade and movement, functions as binding, wrapping, stitching, and holding together what might otherwise collapse. Yarn introduces threads of connection, stretching between forms and across space, gesturing toward continuity between homeland and host land, past and present.

Found objects arrive with histories of use and displacement, enabling the work to operate as an assemblage of lived experiences. Fragile, bendable, and fraying materials reflect emotional states, uncertainty, tension, repair. Together, they create balance: clay needs support, fabric holds form, wood bears load. This interdependence mirrors community survival through care, negotiation, and collective strength rather than permanence or control.

Adinkra symbols carry deep philosophical and cultural meaning. How do you approach translating these symbols into a contemporary sculptural language while honoring their historical and spiritual roots?
I approach Adinkra symbols not as motifs to be reproduced, but as philosophical frameworks—ways of thinking rather than fixed images. Because these symbols are embedded with historical, spiritual, and ethical knowledge, my responsibility is not to illustrate them, but to engage with the values they hold: ideas of protection, balance, endurance, reciprocity, and communal care.

In translating Adinkra into a contemporary sculptural language, I focus on embodiment rather than representation. The symbols often dissolve into structure through the process of building, enclosing, piercing, balancing so that their meaning is felt through material relationships rather than immediately read as iconography. This allows the work to remain open, inviting viewers into reflection rather than instruction.

Honoring their roots also means acknowledging that Adinkra is a living system, not a static past. My own position within the diaspora complicates that relationship; distance and displacement reshape how these philosophies are accessed and understood. The sculptures carry that tension. They do not claim cultural purity or completion, but instead operate as sites of negotiation between inheritance and adaptation, tradition and experimentation.

My goal is to let Adinkra knowledge breathe within contemporary conditions. By working through clay, fiber, wood, and found objects, I create forms that hold spiritual resonance without collapsing into symbolism, forms that honor lineage while insisting that cultural wisdom can continue to evolve, speak, and transform.

With Fihankra opening at the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum and your career continuing to evolve, what feels like the “next level” for you as an artist, and what kinds of conversations or opportunities are you hoping this exhibition will open up?
At this moment, the next level for me is less about scale or visibility and more about deepening my responsibility to the materials I work with, the histories I carry, and the conversations the work enters. Fihankra is up through July 19 2026 and it marks a point of consolidation, where ideas I’ve been circling for years thus, migration, care, instability, and communal memory, come into clearer focus. The next step is allowing these ideas to expand outward through more ambitious installations, public-facing contexts, and cross-disciplinary dialogue.

I see opportunities for collaboration with scholars, historians, architects, and fellow artists, fostering conversations that extend the work beyond the studio and gallery. My upcoming summer 2026 residencies at Wassaic Project and Township 10 will provide the space and time to further explore these intersections, experiment with materials, and develop new bodies of work that continue to examine identity, memory, and community across borders.

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