Adele 이슬 Kenworthy (she/they) is a 1.5 generation Korean American artist-organizer.

Her work centers the AANHPI femme experience, reclaiming Korea’s entangled history of occupation and war while reimagining a heritage we carry in the diaspora. Lisa Lowe in Immigrant Acts wrote “the making of Asian American culture…[includes] practices that are partly inherited and partly modified, as well as partly invented.”

In honoring this place of inheritance and invention, she uses cocoji floral arranging; bongseonhwa (impatiens balsamina) floral nail dye; and the ritual of cutting fruit as vessels of visible hope—weaving participatory performance, sculpture, and family archives to retrace these fragmented memories as artifacts in our intergenerational, transnational struggle to remember.

They create work that transforms these collected and collective memories into sites of matresence and communal care. In their studio, they utilize organic and ephemeral materials like florals and fruits to reenvision these motions into sculptural forms and durational performances, each a living monument to resilience and counter memories exisiting in public.

Her approach to art-making is informed in the methodology of grassroots organizing— what can centering kinship building in community engaged art look like modeled on trust and reciprocity? Art that resists the transactional?

They’ve exhibited in Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, Transformer, Rhizome, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities; Brentwood Arts Exchange, Asia North 2024 in Maryland; and Art Basel Miami. In 2022, she was invited to the Washington Project for the Arts’ Artist Organizer Residency and Transformer's Exercises for Emerging Artists program. Their past DC community organizing collaborators include Empower DC, Chinatown Arts Studio, 411 Collective, and Rising Organizers. In 2023, she gave birth to her daughter, participated in a group exhibition at the DC Arts Commission gallery, and was a member of Monument Lab’s project management team for Pulling Together, the first art exhibition on the National Mall.

Their work has been featured in The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, District Fray, Washingtonian, NBCWashington, and Fox45 Baltimore.

Kenworthy holds her MFA in Social Practice Art with a focus in public policy as part of the inaugural cohort at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design, receiving the 2022 Outstanding MFA Award, the Edna Wattis Dumke Memorial Scholarship Endowment, and the Hortense Mae Boutell Scholarship.

Her art practice and community is located on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank (Anacostan) people, in the Washington, D.C metro area.

resume available here