Artist in Residence – Spring/Summer 2022
Pronouns: he/him
Photo by Joey Kennedy. Courtesy of the artist.
The issues we face are networked, complex and dispersed across different fields — creating a powerful silo effect that distorts social problems and presents them as separate and disconnected. At the center of this web of issues is material disparity. The goal of my work is to investigate the material conditions of working-class folks globally, using narrative, food, performance, criticism and commerce.
Tunde Wey is a social practice artist living between Nigeria and the United States. Working at the intersection of capital and the political economy, Wey’s work engages material hierarchies and disparities, focusing particularly on how economics and finance impact working class Black people globally. He uses food, writing, film, performance, installation and finance to confront these disparities and attempts interventions in the same mediums.
Wey’s work has been widely covered, including in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, and GQ. His own writing has been featured in the Boston Globe, Oxford American, Bloomberg, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Wey has exhibited across the United States and internationally. He is a 2025 Harvard Loeb Fellow; his docuseries is a 2024 CANNESERIES Official Selection. Wey is also a recipient of the Monroe Fellowship from Tulane University (2023) as well as the Ford Foundation Just Films Grant (2022). He is a TIME Magazine 2019 Next Generation Leader and NYTimes 16 Black Chefs Changing Food in America 2019 . Tunde Wey is currently working on a book of essays to be published with MCD (a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Follow Tunde on Instagram: @from_lagos
