Red Lodge Clay Center- Short Term Resident (AIA) 2025
Yinka Orafidiya (they/she) is a socially-engaged ceramic artist and activist based in Philadelphia, PA. In 2018 she launched “Crafting Community”, a cross-continental initiative to connect Black women through collaborative hands-on clay workshops.
Yinka has completed an advanced pottery intensive with master-level female potters in Ghana West Africa and participated in several residencies, including the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works (PA), the International Ceramics Studio (Kecskemet, Hungary), Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (ME), and The Hambidge Center (GA). She received an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts (2017), the Mural Arts Fellowship for Black artists (2022), and multiple awards of support from The Leeway Foundation, including the prestigious Transformation Award in 2019.
Yinka is the Founder & Lead Executive Officer of the OYA Studio, a burgeoning organization established to support and amplify the work of Black ceramic artists.
Interacting with a handmade object inexplicably links you to the spirit of the artist. Conscious awareness of this connection can lend a surreal quality to touching a pot created hundreds of years ago, or thousands of miles away. But even at the unconscious level, this subtle connection has the ability to invoke sensations of warmth, clarity, sensuality, and wholeness.
In a fractured world where loneliness and isolation run rampant, I find even a momentary sense of unity to be invaluable. And to me, providing such meaningful experiences for others is the most satisfying result that I hope to achieve with my artwork.