Karen Seneferu

Biography:

Karen Seneferu is a mix media artist whose work challenges the idea that beauty exist outside of one’s cultural reality. Her work has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum, The California African American Museum, Yerba Buena Center, Skirball Museum, Tuft’s University Museum, and MOAD. Seneferu is also the founder and Artistic Director of the exhibit The Black Woman Is God, which has changed the artistic and cultural landscape of California art.

Artist Statement:

At the center of my work is beauty. Despite what I create I want beauty to be resistance to annihilation. Often times public and private domains are structures of trauma for the Black body that distort how the individual views the self. I want to challenge the dehumanizing depictions by rooting beauty in the African esthetics. I use iconic patterns, forms and colors associated to the cultural value of Africa form and in some cases, integrate those components with technology to speak to the contemporary concerns. This allows for me to dialogue with traditional African art while attempting to advance the medium of the work.

Reoccurring patterns and shapes emerge in my forms. One is the cross, that for me symbolizes peace. The shape represents the crossroad figure who becomes the place of struggles for Africans in American because the binary construct demands one give up one’s cultural identity for the possibility of belong. However, within Yourba spiritual practice, the cross is God. The Kalunga, line establishes a threshold or boundary between the world of the living and the dead associated through bodies of water, like the Atlantic Ocean. Triangles are also embedded in my work. These 3 sides or 3 corresponding faces create multiple possibilities of existence through a prism, which gives me glimpses into sacred geometry, where I attempt to unify something broken, something lost. The metaphysics of my experience is exemplified by the art piece, “Grandson, Mureed, the Seeker” an ode to my grandson, who is third generation with the same first name as He represent tri-or trinity, or completion. His life experiences have already indicated a shift in reality.

This leads to a very important component in the process of my work. I like to invite family, community into my space, to create something unifying. In each exhibit, I have a piece or work either my family member created or had some hand in the making of that work. This inclusion is important, for the exhibition space is designed to separate the community apart from the individual whereas I try to gather parts of myself, my family my community into the work to not only celebrate the beauty I produced but how that production could not have existed without them. The implementation emerges as various assemblage pieces that show the constant battle of claiming the self.  However, it doesn’t always turn into but can sometimes become a beautiful struggle.