Part of the Tuesday Night MFA Lecture Series at Boston University School of Visual Arts. Tschabalala Self creates large-scale figurative paintings that integrate hand-printed and found textiles, drawing, printmaking, sewing, and collage techniques to tell stories of urban life, the body, and humanity. Her paintings and sculptures represent personal avatars, couplings, and everyday social exchanges inspired by urban life. Together, they articulate new expressions of embodiment and humanity through the exaggerated forms and exuberant textures of the human figure, pointing to its limitless capacity to represent imagined states, memories, aspirations, and emotions. Yet Self’s characters possess an ordinary grace grounded in reality: they are reflections of the artist or people she can imagine meeting in Harlem, her hometown.
Self received her MFA from Yale University and a BA from Bard College. Recent exhibition venues include the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle Washington, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the New Museum in New York, among many others. Her work can be found in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the ICA Boston, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Oiakothek de Moderne in Munich, Germany, among others. She has been in artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Red Bull House of Art in Detroit, and was an Al Held Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. Her first solo exhibition in Boston, Out of Body, is on view now at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. |
