Arts + Literature Laboratory presents Mo Apiafo by 2021 ALL Prize recipient Rita Mawuena Benissan. The ALL Prize is awarded each year to outstanding graduating MFA students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The exhibition will be on view at ALL from March 11 to May 1, 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the galleries will be open limited hours from 12-5pm Thursday through Saturday or by appointment. Visitors inside the building will be required to wear masks and practice social distancing, and the number of visitors will be limited according to current public health guidelines. Exhibition admission is free.
Benissan and fellow ALL Prize recipient Conley Clark will participate in a livestream, interactive artist talk and Q&A on Thursday, April 1, 2021 at 5pm. You are invited to join the conversation on Facebook or YouTube.
Artist Statement
I am a Ghanaian American artist. My art and research celebrates African and Black Aesthetic while exploring my cross-culture background and identity as both an African and an American woman. I consider myself a narrative photographer who engages with the mediums of painting, printmaking, and textile to explore the narrative of being Black. I am trying to understand the concept of the “Black Aesthetic” and its relationship to blackness in the western society. My blackness was influenced by my parents’ Ghanaian culture - which is my foundation as a Black woman. This representation also influences the creation of my own fabrics. I embrace my own aesthetic, by reinterpreting the royal umbrella which is the symbol of hierarchy in the chieftaincy in Ghana. The umbrellas are used to protect and shade the King, Chiefs and Queenmothers. In my art, I am contradicting the monarchy and colonialist ideology that they stand for by using my “Black Aesthetic.” I incorporate symbols and everyday items from my culture as a way to reappropriate the umbrellas.
