BECOMING
A Cultivated Identity by Migration
Matilda Forsberg
Kwesi O. Kwarteng
Layqa Nuna Yawar
Curated by
Luma Art Advisory
Three visual artists across disparate regions of the globe compose a visual language of migration and its experience of fleeting memories, adapting a multicultural identity and ancestral archiving.
Becoming is a study on the axis of a migrant city as the trio of artists' studio practice resides in Newark. New Jersey’s populous city of international migrants. A microcosm to cities across the globe.
Becoming is an exploration of a cross-continental lineage of identity.
It’s a tale of cultural exchange and its enrichment of a community.
Matilda
Forsberg
Origin: Sweden
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Matilda Forsberg's juxtaposed renderings of family photographs, reoccurring dream settings, and terrains of her travels are a capsule of life’s events. Forsberg's abstract approach to figuration creates a mystified dream sequence of combined images of the fading past with new experiences.
Kwesi O.
Kwarteng
Origin: Ghana
Image credit: Teolinda Azzizi
Kwesi O. Kwarteng's fabric paintings utilize various culturally significant fabrics and sewing methods to composite topographical maps and multicultural flags. Kwarteng’s practices are patterns of globalization's stimulus to demographic changes by the growing population of migrants in meccas across the world.
Layqa
Nuna Yawar
Origin: Ecuador
Image credit: Chrystofer Davis
Layqa Nuna Yawar creates modern iconography by combining indigenous mythology with contemporary artmaking methods. Yawar’s portraits are a double consciousness of cultural assimilation of a new country and ancestral archiving of the old country in a celebration of diaspora identity.
Becoming, exhibited in May 2022 at the 6-month pop-up gallery space, Out Left Art, in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan. Out Left Art was a collaborative exhibition program between the collective Manufacturer's Village Artists based in East Orange, NJ, and Luma Art Advisory.
Luma Art Advisory managed community affairs and was the rotating coordinating manager of exhibition programs.
Out Left Art exhibited artists based in New Jersey, “left” of the New York art mecca.
The program’s agenda was to broaden the exposure of phenomenal artists of the Garden State by curating thoughtful exhibitions that told stories of our communities.