Recognition reflects more than three decades of artistic practice, arts leadership, and community engagement in the Inland Empire
SAN BERNARDINO, CA, August 2026 — Southern California multidisciplinary artist Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja has been selected as a 2026 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship Legacy Artist Fellow, recognizing her sustained artistic practice, community engagement, and cultural impact.
Davies-Aiyeloja is the sole Legacy Artist Fellow from San Bernardino County in the 2026 Region 7 fellowship cohort, encompassing San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange counties.
“This fellowship is especially meaningful because so much of my life as an artist has been built here in the Inland Empire,” said Davies-Aiyeloja. “I have grown alongside this arts community, and I believe being an artist also means helping create opportunities for others and making sure the arts remain present for the generations coming behind us.”
For more than three decades, Davies-Aiyeloja has combined her studio practice with arts advocacy, mentorship, curatorial work, and community leadership. In the early 1990s, she helped develop the African American Artist Summerfest, a five-year Juneteenth celebration in San Bernardino that presented more than 100 artists and benefited the San Bernardino Public Library Literacy Center. Within the festival, she created Tomorrow’s Masters, providing exhibition and mentorship opportunities for middle and high school students.
Her regional leadership has included serving on the founding initiative that helped establish the San Bernardino Arts Council, now Arts Connection, and as a founding member of Printmaker’s Network, an artist alliance connected with Riverside Art Museum. She has served on the board of Redlands Art Association and currently serves with Riverside Community Art Association and San Bernardino Art Association.
Davies-Aiyeloja works across painting, mixed media, cyanotype, textiles, sculpture, enamel, installation, performance, and socially engaged art. Her practice explores ancestry, migration, cultural memory, ecology, womanhood, and the relationship between personal experience and collective history. Her recent projects include Living Matter, Sacred Imprints, and the Menopause Art Narrative Project, which uses art and storytelling to address inequities in women’s health. Her CV documents solo presentations of these projects at Matter Studio Gallery, USC Keck School of Medicine Gallery, Shoebox Projects, and Gallery 825.
Her work is held in permanent collections including Riverside Art Museum, Loma Linda Ronald McDonald House and Chaffey Community Museum of Art.
