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
1987
Grabado | Print
Malla series
Litografía, collage | Lithograph,collage
5/10
30 x 22”
Printed at a lithography aluminum plate printing workshop with Lynne Allen, master printer workshop by the artits at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Imna Arroyo’s work focuses on issues of identity and her African, Caribbean and Taino heritage. In 1986 she began to explore the theme of “energia de mujeres” or “women’s energy.” The symbolism in her work includes nets, caves, spirals, and water and is often represented in cocoon or conical shapes as the two feminine forms here.
During this period Arroyo’s art was inspired by her feminist view and inspired by the urge to demonstrate women’s shifts from restricted circumstances toward liberation.
The work of this period are about that tension erupting from restriction. During this time these works were created, Arroyo was a single parent raising two daughters, completing her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MFA from Yale, both supported by full scholarships. The work reflects the tension of her restricted circumstances and the potential for breaking free.
- Created: 1987
- Inventory Number: 1987.004
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”.