My Body as a Memory Exhibit

Caribbean Archive’s debut exhibit, My Body as a Memory, will be on display in the Library’s Gallery from September 8th through October 9th, with an opening reception and performance on September 8th from 6:00–8:45 p.m.

My Body as a Memory features five artists of Caribbean/Latin Caribbean and African descent and surveys paintings, performance art, and video/film. My Body as a Memory will explore the theme of the traveling body across the Caribbean and the African diaspora. Our past, the present, as well as the future, cannot be avoided. Consequently, the body becomes an archival gift. Catching sight of this transition, the questions that arise: What does this body, that is also a vessel within itself, entail? What has this body seen? What has this body experienced? What worlds has this body conjured?

Artist Biographies:

Mai'yah Kau is a Queer Liberian artist from Staten Island, NY. Their inspiration derives from West African storytelling, spirituality, and intangible cultural heritage through how they were raised by family members. Kau explores the search for stories that belong to their ancestry and beyond as a way to keep oral traditions while remaining true to new imaginations of the future. Kau's mediums include photography, video, dance, performance and poetry.

Angelica Calderon is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Calderon is of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent. Their work centers on the Afro-Caribbean self and dissociative psyche through familial history, displacement within spaces and aspects of fiction. They are inspired by magical realism, storytelling and personal histories.

Nia Wallace is a Black portrait painter born and raised in the Bronx. Wallace is of Hondoran Garifuna and Jamaican descent. Nia's work is inspired by Black contemporary artists like Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Barkley L. Hendricks.

Ariana Stoll is an American painter of Caribbean descent. She is inspired by her Jamaican and Indigenous Guyanese heritage and her experience as a Black woman. Her work is an experimentation of abstraction, surrealism and representation.

Emily Manwaring is a Brooklyn based painter and sculptor from Queens, New York. She is of Haitian and Trinidadian descent. Her paintings are depictions of New York Caribbean communities.

About the Caribbean Archive:

The Caribbean Archive was founded by Zainab Floyd (B.A., Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University), who is also the Archive’s Artistic Director. The Caribbean Archive is focused on Afro-Caribbean Women of Post Colonialism through the practice of art.

This exhibit is made possible with support from the White Plains Library Foundation.