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 embodied care. In their studio, they utilize organic and ephemeral materials like florals and fruits to re-envision 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.

Their work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Transformer, Rhizome, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities; and Corcoran School of Arts and Design (Washington, D.C.); Brentwood Arts Exchange and Towson University’s Asian Arts and Culture Center (Maryland); and Art Basel Miami (Florida). She was a resident artist at the Washington Project for the Arts’ Artist Organizer Residency and participated in Transformer Gallery’s 20th year of their 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, was in a group exhibition at the DCCAH gallery, and worked with Monument Lab’s project management team on Beyond Granite: Pulling Together–the first art exhibition on the National Mall.

For 2025, they’ve been invited to the MoCa Arlington Innovation Studio Residency and the Post-Grad Residency at the Torpedo Factory Art Center (Alexandria, VA). Kenworthy holds her MFA in Social Practice Art with a focus in public policy at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design (George Washington University), receiving the 2022 Outstanding MFA Award.

Her work has received support from The Maryland State Arts Council, Asian Pacific American Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and the American Women’s History Initiative Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum; and has been featured in The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, District Fray, Bmore Art, Washingtonian, NBCWashington, and Fox45 Baltimore.

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.


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