Cassi Namoda was born in Maputo, Mozambique in 1988 and currently lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. She is a painter whose work interweaves the personal with the historical. Having lived in several different countries throughout her life, Namoda’s nomadic lifestyle and multicultural identity has long informed her work. She studied cinema at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco where she graduated with a BFA in cinematography. She considers narrative frameworks, storytelling and the presence of imagined characters to be significant elements in her visual practice. Reference images often serve as a starting point for her painting process: she is drawn to photographs that recall film-stills, images that echo ordinary yet profound moments of everyday life.
Namoda’s work combines personal memories with archival references in turn producing works that attempt to access emotional interiority and communicate human experience in all its subtlety. The duality between past and present, colonialism and post-colonialism, Africa and Europe, spiritual traditions and a globalised world is a latent force in her most recent paintings. An engagement with—and probing of—art history is a way of confronting the nuances inherent in conflicting ideologies and mutable identities. Her works include frequent references to modern art history where she relates expressionism to emotional intensity.
Namoda’s work has been included in exhibitions at Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in New York; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in New York; as well as the Library Street Collective in Detroit. Namoda’s work is in the public collections at Pérez Art Museum Miami; Baltimore Museum of Art; MACAAL in Marrakesh; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2023, she was a resident at Thread Senegal – Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
46 x 36 x 3 cm Image courtesy of Goodman Gallery.
Cassi Namoda’s expressive portrayals pay homage to her cosmopolitan roots as the daughter of a Mozambican mother and an American father, who spent most of her childhood traveling around the world. Now based in Los Angeles and New York, she infuses her paintings with dream-like elements and folkloric references that, taken together, lend a distinct, cinematic feel to imagined moments largely set in post-colonial Mozambique. Her work has been featured on the front cover of Vogue Italia (January 2020), and is held in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Studio Museum, Harlem; and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
