OlaRonke Akinmowo is an interdisciplinary artist who makes collages, handmade paper sculptures, monotype prints, stop motion projections, and interactive installations. She also works as a yoga teacher and set decorator for film and TV. Through her artistic practice she explores, shapes, conjures, and creates moments that center and celebrate the expansive nature of Blackness and Black womanhood. She is committed to an artmaking praxis that liberates and transforms, that is grounded in collective care and community building.

In 2015 she created The Free Black Women’s Library, a social art project, and traveling library that features a collection of over three thousand books written by Black women, as well as workshops, screenings, performances, and radical conversation. The library pops up monthly in free public spaces and invites book lovers of all ages, genders, and races to engage with the collection, trade books by Black women, and take part in the free public programs. This project also offers the Sister Outsider Relief Grant, an artist grant for Black mothers who are artists, writers, cultural workers, and community organizers, over fifty thousand dollars has been awarded to women from all over the world. The library looks to open an official Reading Room in August 2021. 

Olaronke has a Masters in Interdisciplinary Arts and has received artists fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, Culture Push for Utopian Practice, the Brooklyn Arts Council, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Shop, and The Laundromat Project. Join her Patreon at www.patreon.com/TFBWL to read her reviews, essays, and prose, and follow her on Instagram @thefreeblackwomenslibrary to connect and keep up with her work.