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
SANKOFA, 1999
Mixed media
"My ancestors have been guiding me for a very long time" --- Imna Arroyo
In 1995 Imna Arroyo visited the Elmina Castle, witnessing and feeling the Miasma of despair while standing in the calcified sweet, blood, excrement and other body fluids that were left behind centuries ago. She also stood at the Door of no Returned were she recognized that she was part of a continuum and became aware of her link to a long ancestral thread.
In that same trip, Arroyo discovered the spirit of the cloth. Fabric in Ghana, West Africa is a living library. Cloth contain symbols that represent history, costumes, legends and aphorisms of the cultures. They are worn in plain view of those who are part of that culture and know how to decode its meaning. During those trips to Africa, she learned about indigo dyes, batiks, Adinkra symbols stamping on fabric, as well as the weaving of the Kente cloth. The Ancestral Call woodcut on satin is framed with Batik fabric from Ghana and the Sankofa ceramic sculptures are based on the Adinkra Sankofa symbol that mean reclaiming once past.
SANKOFA, 1999
Mixed media
Sculptures: Terracotta, stoneware clay, sgraffito, stamp, underglaze, gloss glazes
Prints: Xylography on satin framed with batik cloth from Ghana, West Africa
- Created: 1999
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”.