Ato Ribeiro works in a variety of media: sculpture, installation, drawing and printmaking. Born in Philadelphia in 1989, he spent his childhood and adolescence in Accra, Ghana. The articulation of his West African heritage and his African American identity is central to his art. This is evident in his wooden assemblages that reference both Ghanian strip-woven kente cloth and Black quilting traditions of the American South that were used as a symbolic language in the Underground Railroad, guiding slaves to freedom in the North.
Ribeiro works with discarded pieces of wood—a material that he defines as conceptually paralleling the way individuals of African heritage have been treated throughout history. He then pieces these precious scraps together into geometric patterns that are recognizable as a language and even hint at narrative but confound the viewer because their specific code and meanings are not necessarily decipherable. As the artist has explained, “My wooden kente and quilt works, mixed media installations and prints provide educational opportunities to seek out new points of reference, while preserving layers of African cultural heritage and varying ethnic perspectives.”
Ribeiro received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2017 and his BA from Morehouse College in 2012. He recently completed a major commission for the University of Virginia, McIntire School of Commerce Foundation in Charlottesville, VA. His work is in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Mercedes-Benz USA Headquarters among others. He recently served as a 2024 Artist in Residence at the Fountainhead Residency and has been awarded a number of prestigious residencies and awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (2024), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCa Residency (2021), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2018), the Küenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin through the 2017 Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Emerging Artist Award, the Santa Fe Art Institute (2017) and the Ox-Bow LeRoy Neiman Foundation Fellowship, Saugatuck (2017).