April Bey
PROJECT
In her work, April Bey frequently adopts the character of an alien from the planet Atlantica who has been sent on an undercover mission to Earth to observe and report on human behaviour. She developed this persona to illustrate the othering of Black peoples in the United States and the Bahamas, where Bey was raised. Positioned as a kind of utopia, the planet Atlantica, which features in these three mixed-media works, is a haven where Black people thrive and flourish. Bey’s work celebrates and reclaims Black cultural movements such as Afrofuturism, which she argues have been co-opted and commercialised by mainstream culture.
The acquisition of this artist’s work is supported by The Fleischner Family Charitable Foundation
ABOUT
Working predominantly in textiles, April Bey’s interdisciplinary practice offers an autobiographical lens on American and Bahamian culture, creating visual links to Strauss-Howe generational theory, feminist history, digital and print-media cultural discourse, post-colonialist theory, speculative futurisms and Blerd (a portmanteau of ‘Black’ and ‘nerd’) culture. Her work points to cultural appropriation as a form of insidious commodification of race in the United States and encompasses painting, printmaking, collage, video, artist’s books and immersive installations. Bey is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College and her work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Tern Gallery (the Bahamas), the Nevada Museum of Art (US), the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster (US) and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (US), as well as in group exhibitions in the US, Jamaica and the Bahamas.