Chioma Ebinama
Ritual For A New Direction, 2016

Rituals for A New Direction explores how a history of images create a sense of cultural identity. Chioma draws us into her world of demigods and demons, creating tensions of lightness and dark, the authentic and the fantastic. As a daughter of two worlds—Nigeria and the United States—she has been granted a cultural saliency that allows her to be a chameleon, both an outsider and insider. Her delicate and layered works borrow from the mythologies of the pre-Columbian Americas and West Africa, as well as the visual vocabularies of American folk art and Japanese manga. They reflect an affinity for transcultural bricolage as a tool for subverting the Eurocentric art histories and present-day cultural imperialism.