I am an Afro-Dominican American artist, writer, and community organizer from the South Bronx, NY currently based in London, UK. In 2017, I graduated from the USC Roski School of Art & Design in Los Angeles with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts. In 2024, I graduated with an MFA in Painting from the UCL Slade School of Fine Arts in London. I have shown my work internationally, participated in numerous artist residencies, and have received grants and awards for my practice (most recently the Adrian Carruthers Studio Prize for my Slade MFA Degree Show presentation.) I am currently an artist-in-residence at ACME’s early careers program in London. In my social practice, I serve as a creative collaborator for Honey and Smoke, a global artist community and platform focused on creating space for artists to meditate on the important themes of our time. H&S explores these themes through spearheading creative inquiry, education, interactive experiences, and digital content.
My practice explores how individuals within the African Diaspora and Latin America seek joy and purpose, while reflecting on themes of community, ancestry, and colonial history. Most profoundly, I investigate the relationship between the inner child and adult self, creating from an intersectional, femme, and Afro-Diasporic perspective. Through painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and performance, I pursue joy through the use of bright, vibrant hues that challenge perceptions of reality and trauma, expanding how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world around us. I also employ colors to subvert the socio-political condition of invisibility placed upon Black people.
Color is memory, and transports me to my early childhood in the Dominican Republic in the 1990s, where I was surrounded by vibrantly painted homes. These hues not only contain a family’s history, but express the joyous way of living on the island. The oversaturated palette and expressive mark making in my work is both personal and political; It evokes raw expression, spiritual channeling, intuitive action, and emotional honesty. When I access my rawest state of joy, anger, sadness, or confusion, that energy demands to be seen in its entirety in order for it to be transformed. Color, in that state, is undeniably itself. Taking up creative and emotional space in this way is freeing as a soul located within a Black female body.
I visualize real, spiritual, and imaginative spaces. My abstract paintings ask of me to move and embody a diasporic history in order to create their marks and leave behind trails of (coded) information. In my representational painting work, by incorporating remnants of the figure (heads, hands, feet) within abstracted environments, I convey a space in which the body and the spirit can communicate, find alignment, and reconnect. These extremities act as antennas for purpose and spirit and are often depicted and adorned with long lashes, lipstick, and acrylic nails, physical features that embody creative expressions of beauty, self love, and care present in femme communities within the African Diaspora and Latin America. At times, left hands are adorned with green and brown beaded bracelets called Ide, worn by Ifa practitioners, and that I wear everyday. Ifa is an ancient divination system from Yorubaland in West Africa that provides folks with spiritual information regarding their destiny and ancestry through a connection with spirit. It is a practice and way of life that has been present in the African Diaspora by way of Transatlantic Slavery.
The colorful, visually layered, expressively marked and energetic loudness of my work is in direct contention with the psychological invisibility that is placed upon Black bodies, Black souls, Black creativity, and Black histories in Eurocentric societies. It is important to me to create works that are understood by and reflect the experiences of the African Diaspora and Latin American communities, and that demand to be seen, felt, and experienced, because that energy knows itself and knows that you know it, too.
For this Moosey exhibition I focused on a screenprinted drawing of a Black woman who has just climbed a palm tree and is relishing in being at the top of it, a physically and emotionally heightened state. This image can be seen in two different orientations that are upside down from one another: One placing the figure at the forefront of the composition, looking down at the palm tree from above or another from the perspective of the ground that sees the figure at the top of the tree. The image is repeated throughout the exhibition but painted in different colors and layers of paint. It is installed amongst a painted forest of palm trees and graphite drawings that serve as shadows of streams of consciousness.
The symbol of the palm tree not only references the Yoruba story that brought about this work, but also acts as a symbol that connects me and many others to a Caribbean and afro-diasporic heritage as well as my time living in the Dominican Republic as a child. The palm tree as a symbol, character and item of the horizon is omnipresent in 18th and 19th century paintings depicting Caribbean and Latin American enslaved people and colonies. I am particularly drawn to Dirk Valkenburg’s Ritual Slave Party on a Sugar Plantation in Suriname, 1706, Samuel Raven’s Celebrating the Emancipation of Slaves in British Dominions, 1834 and Julien Vallou de Villeneuve’s Little Master that I Love, 1840. Although these paintings all situate the palm tree as a passive element of the landscape or portrait, I offer a different read. Its presence acts as a participant/viewer of the picture plane, an observer or a symbol of healing and liberation. With regards to the Yoruba story of the woman and the palm tree it reminds me that destiny is always present and ready to be climbed.
Presenting the works in La Subida Del Destino (Destiny’s Climb) in this way serve as an ode to the personal and communal journeys that we take in order to feel fulfilled, liberated and ultimately happy. Different layers of paint and colors give the work weight, memory and signal a layered experience. Situating these works amongst a forest of palm trees highlights the potential energy of destinies to come, ready to be climbed or destinies not fulfilled because of external forces and systems. This work highlights a journey towards self actualization and joy. Making work like this is important to me, to my ancestry and to the community who is deeply connected to my liberation and evolution as well as that of marginalized groups. —Eilen Itzel Mena
