Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Roundtable Salon: Femme Figurations
in Contemporary Art

Featuring curator Christiana Ine-Kimba
Boyle and artists Pamela Council, Yvette Mayorga, and Kenya (Robinson)

Moderated by Dr. Jillian Hernandez,
Assistant Professor in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research

This program is a part of the speaker series Radical
Femininity: Women of Color Imaginaries, New Political Iconographies

This speaker series explores how
contemporary artists, cultural producers, and activists are mobilizing feminine aesthetics to transform established political iconographies and create new lexicons.

Sponsors: Center for the Humanities
in the Public Sphere, Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, School of Art and Art History, Department of English, and LUX Art Institute

Bios:

Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work interrogates the broad effects of militarization within and beyond the US/Mexico border and intervenes in the colonial legacies of art history. She fuses confectionary labor with found images to explore the meaning of belonging.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Vincent Price Art Museum, DePaul Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Center for Craft, the Museo Universitario del Chopo, LACMA’s Pacific Standard Time:LA/LA, NXTHVN, Art Design Chicago, the Chicago Artists Coalition, the National Museum of Mexican Art, GEARY Contemporary, EXPO, and Untitled Art Fair. In 2020 Mayorga’s project, “Meet me at the Green Clock,” was commissioned by Johalla Projects as part of the exhibition “Andy Warhol–From A to B and Back Again” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work will be included in the forthcoming exhibition ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo del Barrio’s inaugural large-scale survey of contemporary Latinx art.
Mayorga’s practice has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Artnet, Art in America, Art News, Hyperallergic, NewCity, Teen Vogue, and The Guardian. Her works are part of the permanent collections of the DePaul Art Museum and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She has participated in the Fountainhead Residency and BOLT Residency, and is a recipient of the MAKER Grant. She holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Pamela Council is a New York based interdisciplinary artist creating fountains for Black joy. Guided by material, cultural, and metaphysical quests, Council’s practice embodies a darkly humorous and inventive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. Through this lens, Council uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to make dedications and monuments that provide relief for grief and shed light on under-valued narratives.
Council has created commissions, exhibitions, performances or presentations for: New Museum for Contemporary Art, United States Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoCADA. Council has been Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell, Red Bull Arts, Bemis, Rush Arts, MANA, Signal Culture, Mass MoCA, and Wassaic Project. A recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Grant, Council holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University and is currently artist in residence at ISCP.

Kenya (Robinson) (born 1977) is an American multimedia artist whose work includes performance, sculpture, and installation. A native of Gainesville, Florida, (Robinson)’s work depicts themes of privilege and consumerism, exploring perceptions of gender, blackness/whiteness, and ability. Combining a variety of audio-visual elements and live performance, (Robinson)’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, and the 60 Wall Street Gallery of Deutsche Bank. Her sculpture, Commemorative Headdress of Her Journey Beyond Heaven, was acquired by the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture for its permanent collection in 2014. (Robinson) has been a contributor to the Huffington Post, Modern Painters, and the Opinion section of The New York Times. In 2016 (Robinson) was awarded a Creative Capital Grant for her project CHEEKY LaSAHE: Karaoke Universal, and is currently working on an animated series titled TOONSKIN, while developing BLIXEL, a stock image collection featuring people of visibly African descent.

Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle is a San Francisco native based in New York City. She has held a position at Canada NYC since the Fall of 2019. As the Senior Director at Canada, Christiana is in direct management of sales and works closely with numerous gallery artists. She has pioneered the development of the gallery’s online programming, creating Canada’s first-ever online viewing room platform and digital exhibition archive. Christiana’s recent curatorial debut at Canada, Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm, features work by six black female-identifying artists whose practices challenge and dismantle the restrictive societal confines imposed on the black femme body, both in the virtual realm and IRL. Works by Caitlin Cherry, Delphine Desane, Emily Manwaring, Kenya (Robinson), Sydney Vernon, and Qualeasha Wood have been brought together by Christiana to create a deconstructive discourse around femininity, sexuality, and gender politics through a post-internet lens.