Reflective Looking–Black Printmakers Finding Self and Community Through Print
Curated by Althea Murphy-Price
About the Artist
Tanekeya Word was born in Clarksdale Mississippi and currently resides in Milwaukee, WI. She is the founder of Black Women of Print and holds a B.A. in English/Afro American Studies from Howard University, a M.A. Arts Management from American University.
Currently a dissertator of Urban Education at the University Wisconsin-Milwaukee, with a specialization in Art Education, Word’s forthcoming dissertation (2023) is entitled: Black Womanhood + Black Aesthetics in Art Education.
Artist Statement
Tanekeya Word creates multimedia visual art on paper: drawings, paintings, narrative forms, and fine art prints that centers the everyday fantastical lives of Black women and girls. Presented in quotidian object scale, no larger than the human body, her works are serialized with focus on Black interiority, material culture, nature, and subaltern mappings in harmony with the body.
Word has participated in national exhibitions and her work is held in private and public collections: The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, District of Columbia; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; St. Lawrence University, Canton.
Artist:
Exhibition
Reflective Looking–Black Printmakers Finding Self and Community Through Print
On how Word’s work interacts with the metaphor of reflection:
I am reminded of an excerpt of lucille clifton’s poem, “what the mirror said,” (1980), in which she wrote:
listen,
you a wonder.
you a city
of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
My artistic practice, scholarship and cultural organizing is all a mapping of how I am living, imagining and seeing myself or reimagining the collective memories of my ancestors. It is a throwing back of the ancestral past without absorbing the totality of only trauma but finding the joy, sometimes it is a present mirage considering my displacement as a descendant of Antebellum chattel slavery and the systemic oppression that follows, more often than not it is a manifestation of what could be.
‘shun and ‘ya: Thick like Thaddeus, Black like Marquina
Linocut, relief ink, hand painting, hand embroidery on 280 gsm BFK Rives; 64″ x 42″; 2022
Variable Edition of 2
to know each other’s languages are our own
Linocut, relief ink, textile weaving on 280 gsm BFK Rives; 44″ x 30″; 2022
Variable Edition of 4
headlands: roots nation (study I)
Monotype, hand painting, colored pencil, hand embroidery on 280 gsm BFK Rives; 20″ x 20″; 2023
tender: a sisterhood anthem, (B-side) fig. 014
Linocut, relief ink, hand quilting on 280 gsm BFK Rives; 30″ x 22″; 2021
Variable Edition of 7
tender: a sisterhood anthem, (B-side) fig. 006
Linocut, relief ink, hand quilting on 280 gsm BFK Rives; 30″ 22″; 2021
Variable Edition of 7
tender: a sisterhood anthem, (B-side) fig. 005
Linocut, relief ink, gouache, embroidery on 280 gsm BFK Rives; 30″ x 22″; 2021
Variable Edition of 7
not your great, great grandmother’s fairytale: page one
Linocut, chine collé, decorative paper, monoprint, hand painting, embossing on 297 gsm Crane’s Lettra paper; 18″ x 13″; 2023
Variable edition triptych of 5
not your great, great grandmother’s fairytale: page two
Linocut, chine collé, decorative paper, wood, monoprint, hand painting, embossing on 297 gsm Crane’s Lettra paper; 18″ x 13″; 2023
Variable edition triptych of 5
not your great, great grandmother’s fairytale: page three
Linocut, chine collé, decorative paper, monoprint, hand painting, embossing on 297 gsm Crane’s Lettra paper; 18″ x 13″; 2023
Variable edition triptych of 5