We're thrilled to welcome artist Ama BE as our Summer Artist-Organizer-in-Residence. She is WPA’s sixth Artist-Organizer-in-Residence since the program began in 2021.
Ama BE is continuing her research on the agricultural practices of first generation Africans living in the DC area. Throughout the summer, Ama will host interviews with local African immigrants to collect their stories about food, farming, and medicine, and how they have adapted traditional sacred practices since immigrating to this region. She will be translating these stories into sculptural pieces that will come to life in the gallery space and change throughout her time in residence. In August, she will host a meal with interviewees and other community members as well as a public Open House on Saturday, August 19 from 1–4 pm.
About the Artist
Ama BE is a Ghanaian American, transdisciplinary artist exploring African relationships to land, labor, and migration. She works largely with botanical materials that carry antithetical ties to hegemonic trade, violent labor migrations, spirituality, and holistic remedy. Her work probes at the porous spaces between time, materiality, sentience, and memory to propose nuanced encounters and open suggestive space for performing and embodying Africanfuturity.
About this Residency Program
In the 1980s WPA had a designated apartment and studio space designed by the artist David Ireland. More recently, following our conversion to an artist-driven program model, we shared our space in 2018 with three artist mothers and their children for Artist Mother Studio, a project organized by the artist Amy Hughes Braden in 2018. Since the fall of 2020, we have hosted five Artist-Organizers-in-Residence: Brittney Washington, Bilphena Yahwon, Mikhail Ilyin, Adele Kenworthy, Kamal Rahim Tanner Tourgee, and currently Ama BE.
Dates
May–August 2023
Location
2124 8th St NW
