Black Rock Senegal has announced the 2023-2024 participants for the fourth year of its residency program. Launched by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley in 2019, Black Rock Senegal seeks to support new artistic creation through collaborative exchange and to incite change in the global discourse about Africa.
For the fourth year of the residency program, which will run between August 2023 and May 2024, the residency will welcome sixteen artists of differing practices from around the world. The new cohort was selected from a pool of 1,434 applications which has been said to be a record number for the young program.
“I have served for decades on regional, national and international juries for artists prizes and residencies on some of the most prestigious governmental agencies and private foundations… Never in my life have I seen applications from artists of wider geographical and cultural backgrounds and from as broad a range of media as with the Black Rock Fellowship applications,” says Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art who served on Black Rock’s six-person selection committee.
Joining Weinberg on the Black Rock’s six-person selection committee was Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, a figurative painter who was among the inaugural group of Black Rock fellows; Osei Bonsu, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern; Kimberly Drew, a director at Pace Gallery; Larry Ossei-Mensah, a curator and co-founder of ARTNOIR; and Antwaun Sargent, a writer, curator, and director at Gagosian.
The 2023 Fellows are:
Image courtesy of Artnet.
LILAH BENETTI (born in 1988, Melbourne, Australia) is an award-winning and critically acclaimed artist and filmmaker. With observations from our pre-colonial past, Lilah’s work is often speculative, imaginative and attentive to our immediate futures, recognising that Black Futurism and Queer Futurity are both near and tangible, and require collective agency to build our utopia’s.
ANGE-FREDERIC KOFFI (born in 1996, Korhogo, Côte d’Ivoire) explores the complex articulations of movement, travel and wandering within the history and practice of photography. He applies contemporary postcolonial reflections through various forms and devices in the public sphere to generate a social impact.
MAURICE CARLOS RUFFIN is the author of the forthcoming historical novel, The American Daughters, which will be published in 2024 by One World Random House. He also wrote The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was published by One World Random House in August 2021. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress.
ANTHONY OLUBUMNI AKINBOLA is a first-generation American raised by Nigerian parents in the United States and Nigeria. His layered, richly colored compositions celebrate and signify the distinct cultures that shape his identity. Throughout his work Akinbola unpacks the rituals and histories connecting Africa and America, addressing the power of fetishization around cultural objects.
AMBROSE RHAPSODY MURRAY is a self-taught artist. Through sewing, painting, material experimentation, film and collaborative projects, they create stories to investigate our relationships to the colonial undercurrents of our lives, the charged symbology of black feminine bodies, and the ephemeral and layered qualities of memory and remembering.
CHASE ALEXANDER JOHNSON (born in 1995, California) is a writer from Los Angeles, who draws inspiration from West Africa’s Griot tradition and the folkloric traditions of Americans of African and Indigenous descent. He captures the essence of humanity through narratives that reflect complex identities and challenge conventional perspectives.
CHRISTINA KIMEZE was born in 1986 in London. Unusual surface materials form an important part of Kimeze’s practice, which she uses to explore how texture and luminosity help to investigate themes of interiority, oneness and belonging. Frequently working on suede matboard, Kimeze combines dry chalks, oil pastel and wet paints, applying, crushing and crunching them on the surfaces.
KEITH TUTT II is an award-winning producer, professional cellist, songwriter/composer, and master teacher. He is an artist whose music blends elements of acoustic and electronic music. His compositions offer a unique experience, as he creates aural landscapes that are both tranquil and engaging.
Image courtesy of Artnet.
NICOLAS LAMBELET COLEMAN is a painter who currently lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Coleman’s work is largely autobiographical, primarily using self-portraiture and still life to depict scenes from his life. Drawn to rich patterns, color, and painterly brushwork, Coleman combines his subtle introspection with an energetic artistic boldness.
MAKHONE DIOP, born in 1987 in Senegal, lives and works in Dakar, Senegal. Trained under the watchful eye of his father, Issa K. DIOP, renowned artist Makhone inherits 60 years of art and thus becomes his successor and perpetuates the family legacy. Makhone Issa DIOP is a plastic artist sculptor on bronze at the Village des Arts in Dakar, he is a perfectionist inhabited by attention to detail. His works obey the same impulse of love that is made of living and sublimation of the beautiful.
ARDESHIR TABRIZI’s hand-embroidered textile pieces and multilayered narratives use thread and ink to address the intersection of cultural renewal and historical understanding of heritage in contemporary society. His most recent body of work is a personal journey in search of his own nationalistic identity while understanding the role of these physical places in the cultural, geographic, and political landscape of today.
KWABENA SEKYI APPIAH-NTI is a photographer based in Amsterdam working across the genres of documentary and fashion. Kwabena believes that these social groups are frequently depicted in a stereotypical manner, leading to misunderstandings. His aim is to delve into their worlds and capture their behaviors in order to authentically document the essence of his subjects.
Image courtesy of Artnet.
TIMOTHY YANICK HUNTER is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. Hunter’s practice employs strategies of bricolage, archival exploration, reference, citation, and exploring remix as practice. His approach alternates between exploratory and didactic, with a focus on the political, cultural and social richness of the Black diaspora. His practice synthesizes music, sound, video and image making.
SOULEYE FALL (born in 1994) is a Senegalese-American artist who makes videos, sculptures, sounds, paintings and situations that consider feeling and body knowledge as agents of escapism. He uses his experience in cosplay, world-building, speculative fiction found in gameplay and manga as a way to conceptualize immersive settings. His works questions how systems of power condition reality and how black diasporas navigate, reimagine, and refigure them in order to adapt.
SAMUEL NNOROM (born in 1990, Abia state, Nigeria; lives and works in Jos-north, Nigeria) is a multi-award-winning artist whose work poetically crosses tapestry-like sculpture and pre-loved fabric. Nnorom uniquely draws upon materiality, dedicating his art to textile recycling and a sociological reflection on the human condition. Samuel is interested in the politics that used clothes/second-hand/cast-off fabrics play on human conditions.
OUSMANE BÁ (born in 1988, in Strasbourg, France; lives and works in Tokyo, Japan) is an artist whose practice primarily revolves around drawing, painting, and collage. He has always had an interest in Japanese art, which is why he moved to Japan in 2017 to develop his style and technique, immersing himself in a new philosophy and vision of the world. The spontaneity and gestures of bodies are at the core of his artistic practice.
