Tamia Alston-Ward

I received my BFA in Illustration from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA in 2021, and was the recipient of the 2021 Fellowship Trust Award and the Conrad J. Linke Memorial Scholarship while at The Academy. I was an Artist in Residency with the Black Gotham Experience in New York City in October 2022. My most recent Solo Exhibition at Welancora Gallery in Brooklyn,NY which exhibited over 20 drawings and paintings done mostly in metalpoint, a drawing technique in which I use various metals to draw my works. Previous exhibitions include Silver, DFN Projects and New York Artists Equity, New York, New York 2021 and A Good Habit Formed: Examples of the PAFA Drawing Culture, Philadelphia, PA 2019 . I see myself as a scribe. The record-keeping between the subject and I is the act of artmaking. As a scribe transcribing the spoken word, I too have an obligation to depict each subject with a sense of urgency and respect given that my time with them is ephemeral. The purpose of my work is to encapsulate the ways in which we work within and against the societal, artistic, and material confines we inevitably find ourselves in. As a scribe, each piece is a documentation, and the medium a vehicle for communication. My current practice explores Black Material Culture, what brought Black bodies to their place today, who played a role in objectifying us, and how we objectify ourselves. After researching and educating myself on this Material Culture, my pieces serve as a visual marker of each subject. I hope that my work creates a dialogue around how far we have come and how much left we have to go in working through identities we never created, yet were created in. These pieces are a meditative act on my identity, with each line a conversation with the history of Blackness.