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.
Message
Imna Arroyo cierra el ciclo de sus trabajos para la exhibición Aliento Divino con una serie dedicada a Eshu/Elegguá. El orisha que representa las encrucijadas y los caminos abre la exhibición desde la puerta de La Casa del Libro. En paños de telas y pliegos de papel la representación del orisha predomina en sus
variantes iconográficas. En paredes, desde el techo y en una instalación de piso la representación en sus variadas formas emblemáticas es presencia y miradas a quienes observan las formas múltiples fruto de la mano de la artista.
Aliento Divino estimula la consciencia de la riqueza del mestizaje y la cultura negra en Puerto Rico y su diáspora. Esta muestra es testimonio de un ser y hacer desde la energía creativa intuitiva que dialoga con la razón. Su obra habla de la entrega total al grabado y otros medios que le sirven para comunicar sus conceptos.
Imna logra representar en las imágenes la espiritualidad que el arte encarna. Una parte del universo sacro intangible cristaliza su forma desde el hecho gráfico que retrata el divino aliento inspirador.
-- Humberto Figueroa Torres, 19 de julio de 2022
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”.