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April Sunami at MDK

Jen Wrubles

July – October 2024

 

APRIL SUNAMI

 

MDK | Columbus, OH

On view through early October 2024

 

Artist Bio

April Sunami:
April Sunami is an award-winning mixed media painter, muralist, curator and arts educator. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the National African American Museum and Cultural Center, the Southern Ohio Museum, the Columbus Convention Center, and the National Theatre of Ghana, and have additionally been featured at the Columbus Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum, and the Cuba Biennial exhibition in Mantanzas, Cuba. Her work as a muralist is on permanent display at locations throughout Columbus and Cincinnati, and includes a collaboration with ArtWorks Cincinnati believed to be the world’s most complex large mural utilizing living plants as a multi-media design element.

Her work was selected for the cover of the Winter 2022 magazine of the Akron Art Museum, and she was commissioned by the Columbus Art Museum to create a work inspired by the work of George Bellows, to be presented to the museum’s most honored patron of 2021. Her other honors and awards include the 2020 Future History Maker Award presented by Urban One Media, a 2020 Exemplary Distinction by the Ohio Senate, inclusion on 2019’s Top 10 local artists list by Columbus Underground, and the 2018 Greater Columbus Arts Council’s Professional Artist Award at the Ohio State Fair.

Instagram: @ajsunami
aprilsunami.com

Show Statement

For over a decade I have considered myself a cultural producer, contributing to the ongoing conversation of race, identity and representation in though the creation of paintings that place women of color front and center as the subject of my work. I deliberately create images of strong, spiritual women as a means of proclaiming my personal identity and providing a different lens for the social perception of black women in the United States. Many of my works are titled after West African queens and deities forgotten or ignored by Western historians, Through excavating these names, I feel I am remembering a marginalized past.

As a foundational base of my paintings I utilize oil and acrylic mediums. I render the faces and flesh in oil and I use acrylic to paint the ground palette of the body, clothes, and background. To build texture I use everything including paper beads, maps, wood, fabric, broken mirrors, bullets, stones, breakaway glass from car accidents, and anything else I acquire In most instances these objects that I use in my paintings come to represent specific themes in my work such as spirituality, history and mythology of the African diaspora, ancestral ties.

– April Sunami

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