On View: February 8 - March 11, 2018
Wanlass Artist in Residence Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle will present work from her long term Kentifrica Project in the Weingart Gallery from February 8th - March 11th, in which she will continue to explore convergent histories, truth(s), imaginings and interrogations. For the duration of the show the Weingart Gallery will be turned into a Kentifrican study and research room in which visitors can have tea, research the Kentifrican archives, read books related to Kentifrica, and view Kentifrican objects and items from the College's Special Collections. Inspired by the artist's Art Outside the Bounds field trip to The Museum of Jurassic Technology in fall 2017 and extensive conversations about amassed personal archives from prompts pertaining to personal narratives and images that haunted, challenged and provoked students, this exhibition implements interrupting the aesthetic of the didactic as a colonial tool of codifying.
Kentifrica is a contested geography/continent for which the artist is developing an educational and research platform. Hinkle considers herself to be a descendant of this place and it is a combination of the geographies of her ancestral lands of Kentucky and parts of West Africa. Through re-creating artifacts and sharing narratives and customs from her research archives, she is reconstructing a Kentifrican identity that invites a critical engagement with the intersections of collective vs. personal histories, diaspora, migration, immigration, cross-cultural exchange, and issues of geography and authority in relationship to knowledge production. Through the embodiment of various voices and modes of address, she examines what happens to bodies in transit and how they are contextualized culturally, depending upon historically sanctioned, dominant signifiers of race and culture. The project exists as a multi-layered living and breathing organism that thrives off of collaborations with various individuals and communities who come from multiple social, cultural, geographical, and artistic experiences.
Interested in the books featured in the exhibition? Click here to view the comprehensive reading list!
About the Artist:
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. Hinkle received her MFA in Art & Critical Studies Creative Writing from CalArts and BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Her work and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed Fore at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA and The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire. Hinkle was the youngest artist to participate in the multi-generational biennial Made in LA 2012. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Hinkle was listed on The Huffington Post’s Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know. She is also the recipient of several fellowships and grants including: The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award, The Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), and The Jacob K. Javits Full Fellowship for Graduate Study. Hinkle is a recent alumna of the US Fulbright Program in which she conducted research at the University of Lagos in Lagos, Nigeria.
For more information about the artist and her residency at Occidental College, visit our Wanlass Artist in Residence page.
Download directions to the Weingart Gallery.
This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation.
