Sabrina Adewumi – from the engineering lab to delving in colours

For over 20 years, Jamaica-born Sabrina Adewumi chased engineering, technology, and interior- design project deadlines. Now, she is an abstract artist in her Southern California studio, finding vivid expression in colour, canvas, and the memory of home.

The first painting Sabrina Adewumi ever framed was a birthday present for her mother. She was a final-year chemical and process engineering student at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus in Trinidad, when the idea came. Rather than buying, she would make a gift for her mom. She walked into a local art store, purchased a few tubes of acrylic paint and got to work. Decades later, that canvas still hangs on a wall in her family’s home in Jamaica.

It is a fitting context to frame an artist whose career has been anything but linear. From the centenary St Andrew High School for Girls and GCE O-Level art classes at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, to grad school at George Washington University, and now to gallery walls in Orange County, California, Sabrina has spent her life balancing the rigour of science and the freedom of colour. She is, unmistakably, a child of the Caribbean, a region known for its vibrancy and cultural energy. With recent works on display in several Southern California exhibitions and a fresh body of mixed-media paintings taking shape, she is, by her own quiet admission, finally feeling the momentum.

Adewumi, née Welds, describes herself as the kind of child who was “always drawing or making something.” Her mother kept the small artworks her teachers slipped into report-card envelopes, a private archive of early validation by perceptive parents, Dr Douglas Welds and Dr Betty Isaacs Welds, who nurtured their young Sabrina’s love of art, even as she gravitated towards the sciences. “In high school, I was proficient at mathematics, chemistry, and physics, but I also loved art and was eager to attend classes at Edna Manley. Looking back, I am deeply grateful for the foundation that gave me,” she reminisced.

ENGINEER BY DAY, ARTIST BY NIGHT

While at the UWI, that first painting inspired a habit. Sabrina attended lectures and worked in the engineering lab by day, but by night, in her apartment, she would paint, sometimes until the wee hours of the morning. An internship turned into a full-time job, and amid the steadier rhythm of working life, her brushwork grew bolder. She continued to experiment until a church community event offered her a taste of public recognition and acceptance. “I was painting whenever I could, buying new supplies, trying different things, giving art away as gifts. But at the fair, people bought some of my pieces. I thought, hey, maybe I could really do this,” recounted Adewumi.

Life, however, had other plans. 

An evolving career in project management and business consulting drew her deeper into client work and corporate hours. Marriage, a move to the United States.

Her thesis project at GWU, where she majored in interior design. The career that followed, leading creative teams and facilitating workshops on creativity and project management, kept her close to the language of design even as the canvases sat untouched.

STUDIO AT THE KITCHEN TABLE

It took a pandemic to bring her back to her art. By early 2020, Adewumi had built her own events and interior-design practice after leaving the architecture firm to raise her young children. When the COVID-19 lockdown diminished her project pipeline, and pulled the family closer together, she found space in the afternoons to reawaken her artistic passion. 

Two of her works from that period, ‘Finding Joy’ and ‘Being Still’, are emblematic of that turning point, paintings birthed during those in-between hours of pandemic parenting.

A move from Washington, DC, to Southern California interrupted her art practice once again, but the ocean provided her with the inspiration. 

HERITAGE ON CANVAS

Sabrina works primarily in acrylics, with a current focus on abstract mixed media. Stand close to one of her recent works and you can read the layers: fields of colour, built-up texture, hand-stitched threads worked directly into the surface. Step back, and the influences resolve.

“My current style and use of colour is heavily influenced by my Jamaican heritage, and some of the textures in my recent work are also reminiscent of traditional textiles in Nigeria, where my husband is from, or printing techniques like tie-dye or batik seen all across the Caribbean and Africa,” she said. “Embroidery, though, is a craft passed down by my mother and grandmother. To me that represents my heritage, too.” That confluence of origins and culture is clearly represented in works such as ‘Heritage’, which was recently on view at City Hall in Laguna Beach, and ‘Reverb in Four Movements,’ a quadriptych that captures strong musical influences.  

BREAKTHROUGH YEAR

In 2026, Sabrina joined the Orange County Fine Arts Association and was juried into Showcase, an artist-run gallery, where her work debuted in March. The titles alone read like a thesis statement of her current chapter, ‘New Creation,’ ‘Resonance,’ ‘Rising’, and ‘Becoming,’ evidence of a more confident artistic voice. Since then, she has participated in four additional exhibitions and has submissions pending to several others.

Whatever the circumstances, Sabrina Adewumi maintains her gravitational centre. “My family, my friends, and my faith,” she offers, pointing to where the work begins. “I wouldn’t be where I am without the love and support of my husband and my community. I try to capture and share life experience, and the values that are important to me.”

The prospects are clearer than they have been in twenty years. More local art shows are on the calendar for this summer, and gallery conversations are continuing, while Adewumi focuses on building a cohesive body of work. Ultimately, her goal is something more ambitious: “I would love to host a joint exhibition with other Caribbean-born artists. If that could be in Jamaica, Trinidad, or elsewhere in the Caribbean,” she says, “that would be even better.”

It would, in a sense, complete the journey that started with a hand-painted birthday gift in a St Augustine apartment. A Jamaican daughter and a child of the Caribbean having gone the long way round through engineering, entrepreneurship, and motherhood, spanning two coasts of the United States, Sabrina Adewumi is looking to bring her art back home.