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
Ancestors of the Passage: A Healing Journey Through the Middle Passage gives visual voice to the untold millions of people who died during the Atlantic crossing. Scholars report that anywhere from 40 million to 90 million people were kidnapped and loaded on to slave ships. Investors in slave ships considered they had a profitable voyage if half of the people survived the crossing.
"I had seen the Terracotta Army in China 1995, when I travel to the Peoples Republic of China and it left an impression on me.
I wanted to depicts the African ancestors that died in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, coming back to remained us of our gifts.."
The installation is composes of twenty-seven terracotta ceramic figures each extending their (54) hands reaching out to the audience. The figures are placed on a sea of acrylic canvases and blue and green silk fabric, surrounded by (60) black and white collographs representing a multitude of people witnessing the journey as witness giving voice to the untold story of the millions of people who died during the Atlantic crossing.
The accompanying video, Trail of Bones is the production of Arroyo’s collaboration with graphic artist James Nicholas Winner-Arroyo, producer Jaime Gomez, Lazaro Ross’s mojuba eggun prayer and music by Martin Obeng.
The installation is composed of:
- (27) busts sculptures made of clay, matt & gloss glazed, 19 x 19 x 11 inches each.
- (54) hand sculptures made of clay & gloss glazed hands
- (10) Paper Maché, rice paper relief prints busts, 19” x 19” x 10 inches to be created in 2023.
- (40) Black and white collograph, 22 x 30 inches each.
- (8) Black, white collography and blue lithography, 22 x 30 inches each
- (300) Rubber stamp print on blue rice paper 2 x 2 inches each.
- (15) Textile Rolls of blue and green silk fabric, 4,860 x 1,080" ea.
- (7) Trail of Bones prints: Xilography on chiffon fabric, 118 x 45.5 inches each.
- A 6 minute looped video (YouTube)
- Created: 2004
- Inventory Number: 2004.001-INS
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”.