Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle: The Retrieval
Curator. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. February - April 2018
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s The Retrieval reflects on the disappearance of Black women and female-identifying women due to various abuses and the current human trafficking trade in the Bay Area and beyond. The artist asks, “There’s often a community that knows about women and girls engaged in prostitution or being trafficked? How do we ghost these women/girls and how does society at large ghost them? What one sees and what one does not want to see is crucial to the investigation this exhibition is undertaking.”
Drawings from the artist’s ongoing The Evanesced series focus on the erasure of Black women from the African Diaspora. The haunting Evanesced figures visually manifest as “Smoke Women” who come to the fore, emerging into light or are obscured in a cloud of fog or flow of water. These energetic and often abstract ink drawings are created with handmade brushes while the artist dances to music from the African Diaspora. Forms develop over seconds or days, as Hinkle pulls from her research, personal experiences, and knowledge of the female form. The Evanesced series is also inspired by the #SayHerName movement.
Positioned in the center of the space is a new large-scale, textile-based, healer-figure and accompanying video installation inspired by Nigerian Egungun festival costumes. For Hinkle, the Kentrifican figure has a distinct role to heal and empower people who are soft-targets for manipulation and abuse. As she explains, “This healer figure is able to enter their psyches to retrieve the parts of the self that have succumbed to being victimized,” while it can also “shine a light on larger societal issues that make these circumstances the harsh realities that they are, essentially bringing awareness and shifting the minds of policy makers, traffickers and community members.” The works are new additions to Kentrific, the artist’s research and educational platform for contested geography and culture.
Selected Press
SF Chronicle Review by Ryan Kost
“How can we retrieve people? How can we retrieve ourselves and make ourselves instruments of change?” Hinkle asks. “I’m not interested in defining what my art is. I’m interested in what it has the power to do.”
Gulf Coast Journal of Literature and Fine Art, Essay by Malika Imhotep
About Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Olomidara Yaya) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer, performer, and healer whose practice bridges art, activism, spirituality, and community-based healing. Her work spans intimate explorations of personal and historical experiences to collaborative and participatory projects in alternative gallery spaces. Central to her practice is the concept of the “Historical Present,” through which she examines the lingering effects of history on contemporary perspectives. Hinkle’s healing work—through reiki, sound, divination, channeling, and mediumship—operates alongside her visual and literary practice as a catalyst for retrieval and reflection.
Hinkle’s work has been exhibited and performed at major institutions including The Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, The Hammer Museum, SF MOMA, and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, as well as internationally at Páramo Galeria in Guadalajara, Mexico. She has been recognized with numerous awards, including the SECA Award from SF MOMA, the Fulbright Fellowship, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and the Hellman Fellowship from UC Berkeley. Her work is held in the collections of SF MOMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire, and The San Jose Museum of Art. Hinkle’s writing appears in Obsidian Journal, Artforum, and Among Margins, and she is the author of Kentifrications: Convergent Truths & Realities (2018) and SIR (2019).