ARTISTS SELECTED FOR KEHINDE WILEY’S

Black Rock Senegal, the residency program launched by artist Kehinde Wiley earlier this year, announced today that sixteen multidisciplinary artists have been invited to live and work in Dakar from August to April 2020. In addition to receiving room and board, the artists have access to individual studio space and will be given a stipend for supplies and other incidentals.

The participants were selected from more than seven hundred applicants by a committee comprising artist and producer Swizz Beatz; Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Thomas Lax, curator of performance and media art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Christine Riding, head of the curatorial department at the National Gallery in London; and artists Mickalene Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems.

“I discovered Dakar on a layover in 1997, back when Air Afrique was the sole provider of flights from the west to Nigeria,” Wiley said when he conceived of the program in March. “It was my first visit to Africa and I was immediately enraptured by Senegalese language, food, art, culture, and tradition.”

He added: “Black Rock stands as the direct answer to my desire to have an uncontested relationship with Africa, the filling in of a large void that I share with many African Americans. With this project I wanted to explore my own personal relationship with Africa while inviting artists to do the same and to galvanize the growing artistic and creative energies that exist in Africa in an increasing measure with the addition of diverse, international, creative possibility.”

The artists-in-residence are as follows:

Tunji Adeniyi­-Jones (United Kingdom)
Laurence Bonvin (Switzerland)
Sonya Clark (United States)
Yagazie Emezi (Nigeria)
Nona Faustine (United States)
Devin B. Johnson (United States)
Heather Jones (United States)
Grace Lynne (United States)
Zanoxolo Sylvester Mqeku (South Africa)
Kelechi Njoku (Nigeria)
Chelsea Odufu (United States)
Kambui Olujimi (United States)
Zohra Opoku (Ghana)
Rafael RG (Brazil)
Tajh Rust (United States)
Ytasha Womack (United States)