Artist Ming Smith photographing artist Aisha Tandiwe Bell at Brooklyn Museum during Black Lunch Table in honor of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85.
Born
New York City
Nationality
American
Education
BFA, Pratt Institute; MS Pratt Institute; MFA Hunter College
Aisha Tandiwe Bell is an American visual artist known for her work that creates myth and ritual through mixed media including sculpture performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation that addresses themes of fragmentation, shape-shifting, code-switching, hyphenated identities and multiple consciousness, marginalization, and lack of agency people in the African Diaspora struggle with.[1][2][3][4] Through her mixed media, Aisha Tandiwe Bell's art focuses on and looks at the societal constraints of sex, race, and class. She uses each piece of her art to look at the norms that society has created around sex, race, and class and the limitations that people have placed upon themselves when it comes to these ideas.[5] As a Jamaican-American woman in the United States, Bell uses her art to represent the displacement that she feels and the alter egos that black women have to uphold publicly and privately. The sculptures that Bell creates are intentionally cracked, fragmented, and imperfect to reflect her fractured identity.[6]
Bell was born and resides in New York City. She is a recipient of the 2017 DVCAI International Cultural Exchange to Guadeloupe.[7] Bell has completed a number of residencies/ fellowships including Skowhegan, Rush Corridor Gallery, Abron's Art Center, LMCC’s Swing Space, The Laundromat Project, BRIC,[8]Hunter College Ceramic Residency[9] in 2013 and as the Artist In Residence in 2010 at Abron's Art Center Henry Street Settlement in New York, NY.
