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Divine Nature Works @CMH

Jen Wrubles

July – September 2022

 

Divine Nature Works

Lisa McLymont & April Sunami

 

934 at CMH
Concourse B

On view through September

 

Artist Bios

Lisa McLymont Bio:

Lisa McLymont is a multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer & social justice advocate. Lisa’s art is mainly expressed through drawing and painting, welcoming curiosity to explore many directions knowing that each new experience provides insight while creating work that connects past and future worlds. Lisa has two ongoing portrait series, “The Universe Tribe”, & “The Odes”, focused on nuances within identity and inspired by the powerful communicative styles of protest posters and dreamy expressionism.
Driven to affect the world in a positive way, Lisa’s art encourages others to know the power in collaboratively seeking change. She overcomes anxieties about the unrest in the world through a meditative process of making & taking time to view concepts at myopic levels.

Lisa McLymont was born in Manhattan, NY and has called Columbus, Ohio home since the age of ten. Formally educated in graphic design and visual communications at The Ohio State University, McLymont’s career as a self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist started in 2009, and has included forays into drawing, painting, murals, sculpture, and jewelry design, while letting inspiration found through research and the process of making lead. She is currently a member of the Columbus Public Art Commission, Maroon Arts Group, and is Black, Out, and Proud.

Lisa is represented by Contemporary Art Matters, and she is available for commissions. lisammclymont@gmail.com
Instagram: @lisamc.art
lisamclymont.com

April Sunami Bio:
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

These goddess pieces personify the Platonic solids, and are created in a time of ongoing unrest for female identified beings. Through these diverse faces, I desire to use expression and symbols to call the powers of the earthly elements and will the leaders of our world into a more empathetic mode, using hand mudras along with color and symbols to fully bring these beings to life. – Lisa McLymont

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.

In these paintings I utilize the orisha’s from Yoruba and Fon traditions to embody nature’s elements. The painting titled The Lover: Oshun draws from the traditional iconography of the Yoruba river goddess Oshun. She is often cited as the goddess of love, desire, water, and fertility. Origin: Nana Buluku is an ancient diety who is believed to have originated from the Fon people but her story has spread throughout many West African cultures. She is believed to have created the universe and gives birth to twins Mawu and Lisa who rule the moon and sun respectively. The Healer: Aja is considered to be a minor orisha in the Yoruba pantheon representing healing, flora, and growth. – April Sunami

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