Aisha Tandiwe Bell

Inspired by fragmentation of our multiple identities, Aisha Tandiwe Bell’s practice is committed to creating myth and ritual through sculpture, performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation. Bell holds a BFA and an MS from Pratt as well as an MFA from Hunter College. Bell received a NYFA in Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Work and has had artist residencies/fellowships at Skowhegan, Rush Corridor Gallery, Abron’s Art Center, LMCC’s Swing Space, Workspace Fellow 2018, The Wassaic project 2019 and 2020, Interlude 2021, The Laundromat Project, BRIC and more. She has been a fellow with DVCAI on International Cultural Exchanges. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

“I make figures out of clay, characters that push through the 2D space of a wooden canvas into 3D. It is a metaphor for awareness and for the space between freedom and the traps of race, sex, and class that my characters plot their escape from. I also make Traps, large cardboard traps that evoke consumerism and displacement. I have made and performed a Trap song. In my Breaking head performance, there is also a sound component that describes a woman preparing a meal of various types of rice from the African Diaspora. The woman who climbs the stairs wears a train of clay heads that shatter as she ascends. My most recent works are clay and paint on wood and the trap shows up in these. My focus is the trap, all of its metaphors and the tools used to navigate, escape, or make more beautiful our prisons.”