Ifeoma Ebo

Practice & background

Ifeoma Ebo is a Nigerian-American artist, architect and urban designer based in Brooklyn. Her studio Creative Urban Alchemy brings cultural heritage, equity and community participation into work across art, architecture, urban design and planning.

Her textile practice combines archival collage, fabric and handwork to connect place, memory and culture. Public art returns community stories to everyday spaces. Migration — Kingsborough Community Heritage Walk uses steel works across a housing campus to connect residents’ narratives, migration histories and Richmond Barthé’s historic frieze.

In the interview, she recalls learning sewing and quilting from her mother and combining those skills with architectural perspective, mapping and rendering. The tapestries she describes take Brooklyn’s African Burial Ground as a starting point, imagining rest, meditation and collective healing within a cultural landscape.

She received a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship. Who Art You presents a more intimate scale of making: the time spent crocheting, cultural meanings of beads and layered qualities of reflective fabric all contribute to why she treasures a particular work.

Looking at the work

Archives, textiles and participatory methods make personal and collective cultural stories visible in objects and public space.