Photo ©J Quazi Babatunde King

I’m a roving transcultural, transdisciplinary, transnational spirit, living my life as an artist, photographer, curator, and writer currently based in Washington State, North America.

I earned my BA in Theater Arts from Marymount Manhattan College and studied Ballet and Modern Dance at Peridance Capezio - both in New York City. I spent years learning and playing and finding much of my chosen family in the world of performance and contemporary dance, before shifting into intense cross-disciplinary exploration in photo-based art, video practice, and mixed-media art making.

A couple of years after moving out to the Pacific Northwest, I earned my MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Washington. Hard to summarize it all, but my work consists of conceptual, documentary, and traditional studies in portraiture, ethnographic and esthetic witnessing of land and urban scapes, and relational or abstracted studies of movement, light, and natural space.  

I’m also completely enamoured with analog and alternative practices of image + printmaking. And perhaps because of my transatlantic heritage, born in Sierra Leone and raised in Jamaica and partly in the UK, with German influences of my mother’s family heritage, - my scholarship also examines class, race, somatic and coded dialectic language, and the affects of migrational global displacement specifically for Caribbean and West African diasporic folx.

And yes, there’s some serious politics in all of this…some of which you can read about in my essay Mythology of Memory (originally published by Of Note magazine and republished by the World Policy Journal).

I’m perennially inspired by themes of memory, multiplicity, mythology, spirituality, multiculturalism, and other social technologies that affect identity-performance - especially when asserted as resistance to Westernized erasures of our complex and nuanced existence.  To put this simply…I keep a lot of receipts and I’m always working to figure it all out for my personal health and care of my communities.

I deeply value emotional courage when activating the intellect and a daring practice of radical imagining, reporting, or storytelling. But I also value a particular aesthetic form in my visual work, with an unyielding love of the face, hands, the lines of the human form, and in contrast to this, the formlessness of blur, abstraction, and light. I have been lucky to receive longterm guidance from the late Fernando Salicrup, painter, graphic artist, community organizer, and co-founder of the Taller Boricua in the Barrio in Spanish Harlem, NY; and the celebrated Alternative Processing and Collodian Tin Type photography guru, and founder of Month of Photography (MoP) Mark Sink in Denver, Colorado. Both these artists taught me so much about technique, discovery, and forming community as part of a healthy art practice.

My visual art practice has taken several different avenues which I’ve been able to exhibit with amazing curators or publish in spaces such as Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, ND; Melkweg Expo, Amsterdam, ND; Art Alive Gallery, India; Baxter St at CCNY, International Center for Photography (permanent collection as ‘SeBiArt’), OfNote Magazine & World Policy Journal, NYC; Shunpike Arts - Storefronts, StrangeFireCollective, and 4Culture Media Gallery (forthcoming), WA; Annenberg Space for Photography, CA; MOCADetroit; SPE-Arte, Brazil; UNESCO Courier, France; and selections from my African-German family portrait work Neue Rootz are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Jamaica.

illusive self was the first show I curated at Taller Boricua Gallery back when I lived in NYC - a show collaboratively interrogating with 19 photo-based artists the meaning and formation of identity when home spans multiple spaces.

I had the outrageous honor in 2021 of being commissioned to curate the permanent exhibition Mystic of a Woman on Rita Marley’s life and her ongoing cultural and social contributions to Jamaica and in the African diaspora, which is now up at the Bob Marley Museum.

My first large scoped public scholarship project was conceptualizing and organizing MFON in Seattle - an institutional program of exhibitions which privileged 19 Black Women photographers from countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas – partnering with MFON Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, Frye Art Museum, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and Photographic Center Northwest. It was a challenge, and honor, and a huge learning curve for how to erect a broadly scoped set of programs intended to serve nuanced and complex stories from Black artists in community. For much more on this - grab the catalogue - it’s ALL in there! Quite unexpectedly I received the Champion of Seattle Arts (COSA) Award in 2020 for this effort.

I was named lead recipient of a Research Cluster Grant from the Simpson Center for the Humanities as founder for the Black Cinema Collective (BCC)* - formed under the direct advisement and behest of Media Studies scholar, Susan Harewood, Phd. All our development and programming is organized in collaboration with film artists, arts & cultural organizers, and writers. We have also received funding and project grants from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Seattle Foundation, and 4Culture.

So much of an artists work is necessarily supported by grants and residencies, and I’ve thankfully received such support from spaces such as Centrum Residencies, Shunpike Arts, Vermont Studio Center, National Performance Network, Hambidge/DVCAI, and the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.

In 2019, I was named an Ottenberg-Winans Fellow for African Studies for my ongoing research project Embodied Witness, that celebrates retention of coded Afro-gestural vocabularies in diaspora, most specifically looking at these embodiments in Jamaica and Sierra Leone. I continue to be amazed by its evolutions and resonant responses to screenings of the collaborative short film work and paper presentations at conferences including Tilting Axis 5 at Mémorial ACTe Museum in Guadeloupe, the E.R.I.P. Conference at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA, and most recently at Black Portraitures VII: Play & Performance at Rutgers University-Newark.

In 2021 was named the Inaugural Curatorial Fellow at On the Boards - where I developed UN-[TITLED] - an immersive multi-site specific work with a community of the most incredible humans. This is so far the most personally daring, large-scoped, and challenging project I’ve done to date. With a collaborative family of artists and organizers from New York and Seattle, we put this work up in Spring 2023 after 2+ years of development. UN-[TITLED] reckons with cultural displacement and honors sustained community resistance in the face of rapid urban development (gentrification) in the Central and Chinatown International Districts of Seattle.

So…what all this work means in my life story, interests, and commitments, is that the intense and risky work towards all kinds of possibilities continues - which absolutely could not happen without the risk-taking belief and support of every person I’ve worked with.

I also work (in photography) under the moniker SeBiArt.

For exhibition history, awards, publications, and additional info please contact me for my CV.

*BCC and UN-[TITLED] are projects of i•ma•gine | e•volve® - an arts incubator I’ve been tending to since 2010.

Copyright © Berette Macaulay 2024