Yetunde Sapp was hard at work in the University Center basement tacking fabric onto a mannequin, working on a dress shirt for one of her fashion design classes. She had recently switched her major from Fine Arts. As a new fashion major, she’s trying to learn to merge the visual language she used in fine arts with the technical skill of fashion design.
“I’m scared that I won’t be accepted with what I’m trying to do, but I’m just trying it out,” Sapp said.
The shirt itself resembled a three dimensional version of her paintings, right down to the signature outstretched, almost cartoonish hand on the right shoulder.
A Yesap piece is pretty hard to miss. There are a few key details that present themselves in most of her paintings: the ghost-like silhouettes with large hands. In her portraits, the facial features are bold and colorful.
“You can see the emotion in the color that she uses,” Albert Chang said, a sophomore at Lang.
Her style caught the attention of Lawrence Carrol, the author of My Dear Queen, a children’s book he wrote for his daughter about embracing her natural hair. He asked her to illustrate the book after meeting her in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve.
Sapp has been making art since she was three years old.
“When I was younger, my mom was a teacher. My dad stayed at home and to occupy me he would give me these sheets of paper with my name on it, our address, and our phone number and I had to copy that every day,” Sapp said. “I would get really fast at doing it so he started giving me pictures to draw and I would start copying them and he was like ‘this is pretty good for a three year old!’”
Even after creating for more than a decade, Sapp’s artistic process is rooted in constant learning and growth.
“I feel like I don’t actually know how to paint until I start doing it. As I go, I kind of adjust things and learn, ” Sapp said.
Now, at Parsons, she is experimenting with new mediums, including clothing. As part of her effort to expand her brand, Yetunde uses the Parsons screen printing lab to make custom tee shirts.
“I think that putting art on bodies is a really good way to promote, but it also makes other people feel empowered because they kind of stand out from people when they’re walking around with a bunch of colors on them,” Sapp said.
Sapp also uses her status as a campus representative for Heelys to create custom sneakers for artists to inspire her. Her goal is to eventually collaborate with the brand so they sell shoes with her own original designs on their website.
“I just sent a pair to Billie Eilish I don’t know if she’s gonna like them or wear them because she keeps breaking her foot,” Sapp said.
Rappers Tierra Whack and Guapdad 4000 are other artists she’s working on sending her shoes to. For Sapp, seeking out collaborations and reaching out to celebrities is a good business learning opportunity.
On campus, Sapp is working on growing the Support a Living Artist Collective (SLAC). The idea came to her after feeling disconnected from the community, especially as a commuter. Sapp hopes that SLAC will help build a sense of camaraderie and community to artists around the New School and around New York City.
“After orientation week at the New School, all sense of community was nonexistent. I was living off campus, so after that I didn’t really have much of a connection to other people at the school because I didn’t have the proximity of living in a dorm,” Sapp said.
For Sapp, Slac was an opportunity to create this community on campus. She hopes for Slac to expand beyond the New School one day.
“I wanted to create something that connected people but also gave people exposure to the outside world, because I feel like we’re in school but we’re also in New York,” Sapp said. “ We have this opportunity to connect with everything around us and use the city to create opportunities for ourselves and support each other because there’s way too many of us to not be taking advantage of that.”