Ama BE is WPA’s 2023 Artist-Organizer-in-Residence. Ama is continuing her research on the agricultural practices of first generation Africans living in the DC area. Throughout the summer, she hosted 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 is then translating these stories into sculptural pieces that come to life in the gallery space and change throughout her time in residence.

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.