Yetunde Sapp
digital resident \ april 2027
Yetunde Sapp is a DC-native, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working across painting, textiles and fashion, public art, installation, and design. Her practice explores storytelling, memory, material culture, and the construction of personal and collective histories. Working fluidly between intimate objects and large-scale public works, she uses color, portraiture, pattern, archival research, and spatial installation to consider how stories are held, remembered, and transformed.
A graduate of Parsons School of Design and a former Gucci Changemakers Scholar and Converse All Stars Class of 2025, Yetunde has developed a practice that moves fluidly between studio and community-based contexts. Her mural practice began in 2018 with the Anacostia Watershed Society and has since grown into large-scale public works across multiple cities. During the 2020 protests in Washington, DC, one of her works was acquired into the Smithsonian’s permanent collection and later exhibited in Utopia World at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. Her work has also taken the form of immersive installations, including Heirloom Museum, as well as textile and fashion design, where she similarly investigates the relationship between objects, identity, history, and memory.
Anacostia, where Yetunde was born and raised, has remained one of the most formative forces throughout her artistic journey. Growing up in the neighborhood and spending her formative years in nearby Anacostia Park deeply shaped her understanding of place, community, memory, and storytelling. Her practice continues to return to the people, histories, landscapes, and visual language that shaped her early understanding of the world. During her digital residency with the Nicolson Project, Yetunde looks forward to developing and revealing the process behind her Anacostia Park Junior Ranger book—a project bringing together research, illustration, storytelling, and personal memory to revisit a place that has been part of her life since childhood.