The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2025 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Adetokunbo Borishade
Cleveland Ohio 44106 United States Home Phone: 2164718811
Bio
Adetokunbo Knowles Borishade, Ph.D. holds an earned doctorate degree in Africana Studies with a minor in cultural Anthropology. She is a semi-retired professor who creates vivid themes from her knowledge in African history and culture. This multi-talented educator’s work always contains strong spiritual elements, as expressed in her publications, lectures, poems, stage plays, and recent film script.
Dr. Borishade’s academic studies are augmented by field research in 1993 among the Yoruba traditionalists in Nigeria. She is a scholar-advocate who has consistently shared her academic knowledge with non-academic community members who do not have the advantage of university education. This native Clevelander taught for twenty years at universities in America and in 2008 taught for six years in Liberia, West Africa, as well. In Liberia she held positions as Founder and Chair of Africana and Liberian Studies at Cuttington University for three years, and later as Associate Vice President for Curriculum and Programs at African Methodist Episcopal University.
After making contributions to Liberia, Dr. Borishade returned home to Cleveland in 2013 to once again contribute knowledge to local American communities. Her many years of research, publishing, and teaching abroad expanded Dr. Borishade’s perspective. She acknowledges that just as she had delivered new Africa-centered knowledge and methods of analysis to her Liberian students, the traditional Liberians had enlarged, influenced, and deepened her academic knowledge in more than equal measure.
Artist Statement
During the first few months of my return home to Cleveland, Ohio in 2013, some of my relatives encouraged me to write and publish a genealogy book based upon the National Geographic DNA laboratory results from the sample I had submitted six years earlier. The worldwide Genebase Laboratory DNA study (2005) traced my lineage, through my mother’s line, all the way back to 140,000 BCE. I completed the research and published the book in 2014. For the next four years my energies were dedicated to conducting community workshops as well as writing and producing stage plays based on ancient and pre-slavery African history.
Around 2016 the DNA research data that I documented and published in my book mysteriously impregnated my conscious body of African history and social reality. An embryo developed; a composite image that germinated within the womb of my consciousness and stubbornly refused to be aborted. The image insisted on being birthed into reality. No “why” questions, no excuses, no arguments about my inexperience in visual art sufficed. That image would not budge from its mission. In early 2019 the right set of circumstances lured me into starting the arduous labor pains that produced my first-ever painting that is referenced above.
