ARTIST BIO
Mouminatou Thiaw is a Senegalese American artist born in Dakar, Senegal. She explores rememory, grief, faith, migration, isolation and organic life in her works to develop Africanist and Womanist iconographies for storytelling. With painting, collage, printmaking, and sculpture, she pulls from corporeal connection and memory to respond to both her internal and external worlds. She layers color to suggest the illusory textures of human memory, and creates from the roundness, warmth and color of her childhood imagination. Informed by her curatorial scholarship, Thiaw regards creative exploration and art literacy as central to critical and hopeful thinking about representations of race, identity, the body, and the earth.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am interested in connectedness and mobility, the closeness of my organs to each other, my sensitivity to the world around me, and the earth between my fingers and under my feet. I love roundness and fullness, the warmth of the sun and light of the stars. My work across mediums connects the physical, the spiritual, and the tactile experiences of my life, my worries, and my hopes. Both my body and my engagement with the earth are wrapped into a symbiotic relationship with my spirit: What do we see in each other, the earth, the Spirit and me? A spiritual, emotional and physical ecosystem swirls within, digesting my anxiety, holding my hopes, and forming embryonic beings. What lives internally is released externally, Like the earth cries out in fire and dust and ice, or brings forth flowers and fragrances from the soil. With the clay, I am forming a breadth of fossils, organic beings impressed into the earth, consumed and connected. In my search to feel safe and rooted, I harness repetition in my lithographs, fluidity in my paintings, and stability in my fossils, seeking solace through creating.
