Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle: The Evanesced Series
About:
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the “Historical Present,” as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective. Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco and The Made in LA 2012 Biennial. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
She is also the recipient of several awards including: The Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), Jacob K Javits Fellowship for Graduate Study, The Fulbright Student Fellowship, and The Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artists Award. Her writing has appeared in Not That But This, Obsidian Journal, Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics, and she has a forthcoming first book called SIR, a reflection on naming as a tool for undefining the defined, that will be published with Litmus Press. Hinkle has a current solo show called The Evanesced at The California African American Museum in Los Angeles on view until June 25, 2017.
The Evanesced
In The Evanesced, 100+drawings, large scale paintings and a performance bring attention to a painful subject: missing black women in America and the African diaspora, from history to the present day. Abstract “un-portraits”of elusive figures–drawn with handmade brushes and while the Hinkle improvises dances to blues, hip-hop, and Baltimore Club music–pivot between real and imagined narratives representing thousands of black women who have disappeared due to colonialism, human trafficking, homicides, and other forms of erasure. The Evanesced: Embodied Disappearance is a performance that evokes various types of women navigating historical and contemporary contexts. The performance–which includes a soundtrack of whispers, shuffles, and snippets of popular and underground music–adds another dimension to this emotional examination of a fraught part of the black female experience. The Evanesced is an expression of the #SayHerName movement of mourning, awareness, and healing. The Evanesced exhibtion was curated by Naima Keith and debuted at The California African American Museum March 2nd-June 25th 2017.