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Aisha Tandiwe Bell
About:
New York artist Aisha Tandiwe Bell’s delicate ceramics reference her multiple identities as a Jamaican-American woman living in the United States. The broken, cracking, and striped forms of her Artifacts series are alter-egos the artist makes to embody her feelings of displacement. Her sculptures are intentionally imperfect, riven with lines and cracks, either made up of broken pieces forced into one or painted in high-contrast stripes, reflecting Bell’s fractured identity. The conflict inherent in these fragmented forms is a representation of Bell’s relationship with the many roles black women are expected to play both privately and publicly. The act of making and displaying these alter egos serves as an exercise in personal redemption and commemoration of past lives, a nostalgia that Bell references in her accompanying performance piece, “Segues and Tangents.” When she sings, “Yeah we wept, when we remembered Zion,” a line from the Rastafarian anthem “By the Rivers of Babylon,” she also references psalm 137:1 of the bible, which describes the pain of losing paradise when the Jews were forcibly taken from Jerusalem as captives by their enemies and enslaved in a foreign land.
Chimera, 2015.
I had a son he would look a lot like, 2015.
Trickout This trap, 2016 (performance)
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Brooklyn-based Aisha Tandiwe Bell is an interdisciplinary artist whose work centers upon the individual burdens, insecurities, stereotypes, masks and self-prescribed traps we wear and the ability to transform, resist and/or escape these traps. Bell creates life-sized traps out of cardboard, fabric, and other materials that the viewer can enter. Bell received her BFA and MS from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; and her MFA from Hunter College, New York. She has had work in shows at Space One Eleven, Birmingham, AL; Gallery 221 @ HCC, Tampa, FL; Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn; and Rush Arts Gallery, Marianne Boeksy Gallery, and Abrons Art Center, all NY; among others. Her residencies include Hunter College Ceramic Residency, The Laundromat Project Public Art Commission, and the LMCC Swing Space Residency on Governors Island.(text BRIC Brooklyn)