Imna Arroyo
New London, CT
Imna Arroyo is an Afro-Puerto Rican artist whose work weaves the threads of heritage and ecological veneration into a contemporary artistic dialogue.
MessageImna Arroyo Biography
Written by Migdalia Salas, Connecticut, January 2024
Imna Arroyo was born in the town of Guayama, on the Caribbean coast of Puerto Rico, in 1951. The artist's familial heritage is of Taino, African and Spanish lineage. The threads of that cultural heritage are interwoven throughout the tapestry of her life.
Arroyo's foundational training in art-making began in high school, the start of a continuum that later directed her to the Escuela de Artes Plásticas del Instituto de Cultura in San Juan. Moving to New York gave her the opportunity to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1977 and culminated with her studies at Yale University in New Haven, from which she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1979.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s the artist established her studio practice along with a university career as a studio art educator. A yearning for knowledge and search for identity became the predominant theme in her artistic pursuit. The work from the 1980s through the 1990s is informed by her feminist views and inspired by the urge to demonstrate women’s shifts from restricted circumstances toward liberation. In 1992 she solidified her professorial career upon being appointed educator and Chairperson of the Visual Arts Department at Eastern Connecticut State University.
The beginning of the 21st Century is punctuated by multiple journeys to Cuba to conduct her own ethnographic studies into the field of Yoruba African spirituality, an endeavor that also leads her to Brazil and Nigeria. Upon the dawn of this new millennium, now an established artist and educator, she completes the Sankofa installation (1999) and goes on to create major bodies of multimedia installation work, Legacy (2001), Yemaya (2000-2001), Ancestors of the Passage (2004), Iroko (2017) and Èṣù Elegbá (2022) and Iroko: Los Ancestros.Los Abuelos (2023).
Today, the artist lives and works in Eastern Connecticut.
Statement
I am, first and foremost, a product of the Puerto Rican printmaking tradition, and connected to the medium’s symbiotic relationship with populist social justice movements. As a printmaker, as well as papermaker, bookmaker, sculptor and video producer, who incorporates these into multi media installations, I believe that materials are infused with their own inherent energy that meld with my own energy, or Ashé, to create works that not only elicit aesthetic, intellectual or emotional responses but also ecological and spiritual responses as well.
I seek to reach a place where all things intersect - thought, feeling and action weaving themselves into the fabric of time and place. In Ghana, where the concept of seeing material as a healing conduit began, I developed a visual lexicon while working with textiles. Coming from a family of seamstresses, for me it was second nature.
Nature informs my experience and search for identity, the goal of which is the reclaiming of my spiritual and cultural heritage. In my installations I endeavor to honor ancestors and to acknowledge the indelible mark that they have made on the lives of their descendants as well as the broader cultural landscape. My work explores the different manifestations of nature, the spirit and beliefs of the African ancestors; it gives voice to their stories, activating both physical and spiritual spaces.
Puerto Rican artist devoted to exploring connections between the African continent and the Diaspora in an on-going endeavor to reclaim a lost and scattered heritage. Arroyo draws upon the imagery, symbolism and language of the Yoruba traditions of Africa to express a majestically complex and sophisticated worldview. In her multidisciplinary practice, she finds inspiration in the concept that art-making can be a ritualized form of healing.
"It is my intent to create Art that heals the deep-seated collective wounds of history, as well as to celebrate the vibrancy and relevance of a long denied ancestral legacy of self-expression", Imna Arroyo
Renowned scholar and Caribbean art and cultural critic, Yolanda Wood writes “… Imna Arroyo remains continually focused on those junctures where everything that is located outside the practices of hegemonic power, in the domains of the undervalued and subaltern, somehow meets. Settling within the space/time of these multiple references, she has inserted her own poetics based on life stories, autobiographical details, gender imprints, and the memories that inhabit them, all inscribed on the skin and in the reflections of the African subjects enslaved in times of modernity/coloniality and their descendants—which in fact we all are—and whose condition of existence the Barbadian writer George Lamming has identified as “a historical experience” in the Caribbean, yet one that certainly extends beyond the dominion of the plantations. From her migrant status, yet the bearer of a U.S. passport, Arroyo has succeeded in penetrating these silenced and hidden areas”.