Affinity Gallery is pleased to announce its debut presentation at EXPO CHICAGO 2026, featuring new works by Anne Adams, Buqaqawuli Nobakada, and Samuel Nnorom. Together, the artists offer a poetic re-mapping of space in which abundance is claimed, memory is honored, and new worlds are continually imagined.
Drawing from her academic background in architecture, Nobakada constructs meticulously designed interiors and landscapes charged with emotional resonance. Her paintings envision a contemporary utopia where Black women occupy environments defined by elegance, care, and unrestrained possibility. Describing her process as a form of “mass manifestation,” Nobakada collapses the distance between dream and reality. What began as a visualization has evolved into a living memoir, with each canvas functioning simultaneously as prophecy and document.
Anne Adams expands the presentation through an interdisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, ceramics, collage, and photography. Her work engages questions of hybridity, postcolonial identity, and material history, drawing from archival research and indigenous forms to create layered, speculative narratives.
...
Samuel Nnorom approaches material as a vessel of memory through sculptural textile forms that map emotional and social terrains. Rooted in Nigerian cultural histories, his practice elevates fabric as a dynamic language—bridging personal narrative and collective experience. Through scale, texture, and repetition, Nnorom transforms the everyday into sites of reflection, connection, and belonging.
In dialogue, the artists’ works engage the architectures of hope, the textures of belonging, and the radical act of imagining oneself beyond imposed limits. Together, they propose expansive ways of inhabiting space; materially, emotionally, and futurally positioning their practices within a global conversation on identity, memory, and world-making.
