Black Arts Legacies: Jite Agbro collages layered identities

Editor’s note: This story is one of more than 55 profiles of influential Seattle artists past and present who are featured in our Black Arts Legacies project. Explore more dancers, painters, poets, musicians, actors, DJs, sculptors and creatives of all kinds.

On an April day in Fremont, the metallic squeak of a hand-cranked industrial press fills a windowless studio. It’s the sound of Seattle multimedia artist Jite Agbro slowly squeezing a print through the roller.

Nestled into an unassuming brown building off Leary Way, Agbro’s space shines despite a lack of natural light. Fairy lights hang from the ceiling, stacks of colorful fabric and paper burst from the shelves, and piles of half-finished collages brighten the room. At the moment, Agbro is in the process of creating figurative pieces for a solo show at Patricia Rovzar Gallery in July 2025.

Agbro’s work and career stem from her profound connection with the Seattle arts community. Raised in the heart of the Central District, Agbro wandered into Pratt Arts Center as a child, started taking print classes, and eventually blossomed into a mixed-media artist all her own.

In recent years, her 2D work has appeared in places like the Northwest African American Museum and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and netted her a Neddy Award nomination in 2019. She also makes murals and large-scale immersive installations.

Because Agbro’s work blends a variety of techniques — etching, monotype, sewing — it might best be called “collage.” But her time-intensive process is far more complex than simply snipping and pasting together material. Every piece involves painstakingly building up layers of ink on bits of paper or fabric, a practice she likens to developing a photograph.

“It’s my process,” Agbro says. “I don't really know of anybody else who does it like this.”

In her studio, Agbro smears a thin layer of ink onto a small scrap of paper and rolls it through her press, pushing the ink deep into the material. Then she pulls the paper out, revealing a brilliantly even-colored orange. She typically repeats this process hundreds of times over a period of weeks, using kozo cloth (a fabric-like fibrous Japanese paper made from mulberry trees), cheesecloth, wallpaper, banana paper or vinyl. Then she’ll collage the pieces together bit by bit and adhere everything together with a thin layer of wax.

For her, the process is meditative, and the studio acts as a place not just of work but of refuge. “It’s a crazy world, but I can always just come in here,” she says motioning to her space, “and do this.”

Agbro’s marvelously textured, colorful backgrounds often draw on her Nigerian heritage. The artist has been back to Nigeria only twice (both since 2015), but those visits left a huge impact. “If I could go every year, I would go just to see the clothes that the ladies are wearing,” she says.

Instead, she studies Nigerian fabrics online to learn from their construction, patterning and designs.

Her work, however, specifically explores belonging and self-presentation in the Black American community. The figures in her collages are faceless, leaving other details — their clothing, hair, posture — to convey their inner worlds. For Agbro, these modes of personal expression are a kind of self-defense; they mirror the ways marginalized communities armor themselves to deal with the prying, extractive eyes of outsiders. Adding multiple layers of textiles, paint and glue is a way of strengthening the shield.

“Most of the work I make is about protection,” Agbro says. “I’m fascinated with gestures and the clothes we wear and the facade that we put on, the image that we create.”

Inspired by characters from literary works by authors like Zadie Smith, Octavia Butler and James Baldwin, her figures have a pensiveness, as if the viewer has caught them in a moment of contemplation. Her soft, delicate materials lend them an almost psychological quality — accumulating in literal layers for viewers to parse and understand.

In “Empty Signifier,” for instance, two figures composed of red and gold wallpaper stand with their hands in their pockets against a solid marigold background with blue patterns peeking out behind it. One wears a long trench coat and the other a turtleneck. They seem to gaze at the viewer, which makes looking at this work feel like trespassing onto their conversation. With the way their bodies are angled toward one another, it’s like they’re cutting the viewer out, as if they’d prefer to keep their thoughts to themselves.

In “Self Corrected Self,” a figure made of floral paper pulls up the hem of their dress to reveal their arched foot while their shadow makes the same gesture but in a pale red. There’s a clear duality to the work, but its meaning is up for interpretation. Perhaps the figures we see are a self and a shadow self, hidden away from the rest of the world. Or maybe these mirrored figures are the self and an imagined self that’s lighter, freer, less burdened.

Agbro was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1982 to an African American mother from Chicago and a Nigerian father. Her parents met as students in Oakland, California, and, after traveling back and forth between the States and Nigeria, they eventually settled in the Central District when Agbro was 2. Alongside her sister and two brothers, she spent most of her childhood living in Bryant Manor, a low-income housing complex on East Yesler Way and 18th Avenue South.

The neighborhood was economically depressed, but Agbro remembers the artistic vibrancy of the time. She lived just blocks from the Pratt Fine Arts Center, and would often see people blowing glass and working with metals on her walks to the store. One summer day when she was 9, she stumbled into a kids’ arts class where children were making potato prints — carving shapes into the spud, dousing them in ink, and stamping it onto a piece of paper. Intrigued, she decided to stay.

“I kept taking those kids’ art classes, they were free on Saturdays. It’s where I met a lot of people who are still my close friends,” Agbro says. She remembered loving the potato prints because of their immediacy. Her love of print and repeated pattern came at an early age. “I liked that you could do a bunch of them and that each one would be different.”

Throughout elementary, middle and high school, Agbro slowly started taking extra classes at Pratt from artists like Marita Dingus and Romson Bustillo, exploring printing, drawing and whatever else the art center had to offer. Dingus remembers seeing teenage Agbro’s art for the first time — unlike the work of her peers, it wasn’t comic-book drawings, but something far more sophisticated.

“She was manipulating color, she was manipulating the human form,” Dingus remembers. “It was somewhere between realistic and abstract. Her surfaces had a lot of nuances and gradations and values going on. These are things that more developed artists start investigating.”

Greg Robinson, a former director at Pratt, remembers meeting Agbro as a young adult and feeling immediately moved by “the curiosity she had and how she kept coming back and hanging out,” he says. In 1996, he extended the art center’s Pathway Scholarship to Agbro, which enabled her to take classes with her materials costs completely covered. The entire experience was deeply transformative for many aspects of her life.

“I had a weird relationship with paper,” Agbro reflects. “At school, paper was this scary thing because I was dyslexic and I wasn't a very good student. If I had to write a paper, it was this awful, awful experience. But if I go into a studio and I have to draw on a piece of paper, then I transform this object into something that brings joy instead of absolute terror.”

Agbro graduated from Running Start in 1999 and — armed with an extensive art portfolio, thanks to Pratt — headed to California College of the Arts in Oakland to pursue printmaking. Unable to find her rhythm in Oakland, she returned to Seattle after a year and enrolled at Cornish College of the Arts.

As the child of an immigrant parent, Agbro was extremely aware of the fact that many of her Cornish peers came from wealthy families and had stability while pursuing a notoriously unstable career path. “We grew up in low-income housing,” Agbro says. “I never felt 100% comfortable going to arts school.”

Over the next several years, she cycled in and out of college, taking time off to work and spend a few years in places like Atlanta and New York. It wasn’t until 2006 that Agbro settled in the Seattle area for good, eventually receiving a bachelor’s degree in environmental design from Evergreen State College in 2009 and a master’s of science in design and engineering from the University of Washington in 2014.

As she pursued her education, Agbro took a break from making art for two years, from 2012–2014. When she came back to it, she says it almost felt like starting over. But that space away from her work allowed her to develop her iterative, printmaking-inspired, multilayered process. In 2018, Agbro resumed showing her work with skap got, an exhibit at 4Culture Gallery that explored the ways in which marginalized communities have served as scapegoats for society at large.

Over the next few years, Agbro had shows at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art and made installations at the Central District’s PCC grocery store, but the biggest turning point, creatively, for her was the 2022 show P.L.U.A. (Proposed Land Use Action) at MadArt Studio. 

P.L.U.A., an immersive replication of Agbro’s childhood home at Bryant Park Manor, invited viewers to walk through the building. But instead of solid walls, Agbro reconstructed the space with her signature billowy, hand-printed material stitched together in varying shades of blue. The idea came when Agbro saw that the original building had been slated for demolition and wanted to commemorate the space the best way she knew how.

“It was very different from most pieces that I have ever done. I didn’t have any figures in it because I wanted the people who walked into the piece to become those figures,” she says.

The choice of blue was many-layered: references to blueprints and blues music as well as an ode to Agbro’s hometown in Nigeria where indigo fabrics are important.

Though the installation wasn’t a one-to-one recreation, it was meant to evoke the memories of the space. “We all remember our homes differently, right? I had this kind of ghostly memory of this place where I grew up that was now being demolished, to be turned into something else. I’m sure lots of people in Seattle have had that feeling.”

After completing the MadArt show, Agbro’s sense of what she could do expanded – P.L.U.A. really pushed her limits by moving her from a single wall into wide-open space. In addition to her figural pieces, her work since then has decorated the sides of buildings, like her double mural at Tapestry Apartments, depicting Seattle queer icons DJ Riz Rollins and singer Adé Cônnére.

While most of her current focus is on an upcoming show of collages in July, her mind is still on P.L.U.A. Circumstances made her put together the immersive installation on an abbreviated timeline and, over the past few months, she’s been applying to residencies to find time to build on to the installation by making different rooms, hallways, and the like.

The impulse to keep augmenting the work falls right in line with Agbro’s collage process — adding layers, small and large, pushing them through a press, and cobbling them together until a piece feels sufficiently layered, even fortified.

“I’m just not done with the memory of home,” she says.