WORKSHOP: Social Connection Art Workshop with Kwadwo Adae

Kwadwo Adae is a Ghanaian-American visual & muralist based in New Haven, CT. After earning his Masters in Painting from New York University in 2005, he became the Founder & Director of Adae Fine Art Academy; an independent art school that specializes in the individualized instruction of drawing and painting to children, teenagers, and adults. An award winning collaborative public artist responsible for the installation of seventeen murals in Connecticut since 2014, and has implemented the orchestration of three international collaborative mural projects with children in India, Guatemala, and Ecuador. Adae is strongly committed to contributing to the discourse of public art that amplifies the voices of the underserved by focusing his investments and public artistic endeavors in local communities that were subjected to discriminatory redlining policies. His domestic public art work speaks directly to themes of social justice, racial equality, women’s rights, gun violence, and environmental awareness; his international public art works focuses on the art of decolonization by amplifying the voices of the indigenous in places formerly subject to cultural erasure by European colonial powers. Adae works in collaboration with the Urban Resources Initiative, and whenever space permits, multiple trees are planted in front of his murals to increase the tree populations of our urban forests and make public art that also fights climate change.