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.
MessageI AM
I am air
I am water
I am fire
I am earth.
I am the river
I am the sea
I am the heat that moves mountains
I am divine breath
Stardust that connects to all that is and will be.
The infinite dream of the Dreamers.
The light that dances behind this veil of flesh and bones.
Agboola,Chola TiemblaTierra Batalla, Buffalo Heart Woman, Star Mother, they call me, and I answer to the cry of the
I AM.
YO SOY
soy aire
soy agua
soy fuego
soy tierra
yo soy el río
yo soy el mar
Soy el calor que mueve montañas
soy aliento divino
El polvo de estrellas que conecta con todo lo que es y lo que será.
El sueño infinito de las soñadoras.
La luz que baila detrás de este velo de carne y huesos.
Agboola, Chola Tiembla Tierra Batalla, Mujer Corazón de Búfalo, Madre Estrella, me llaman, y responder al clamor del
YO SOY.
- Subject Matter: Portrait
- Created: September 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”.