Tyanna Buie: After Image

About

MMoCA will present Tyanna Buie: After Image in the State Street Gallery from May 4 through September 22. The exhibition represents the culmination of the artist’s multi-year research into and excavation of her childhood. Buie, who takes inspiration from the scant family photographs remaining from her youth, translates those captured moments into large-scale, print-based portraits and installations. She collages into her prints various elements, like bits of clothing, jewelry, hair accessories, and other youthful adornments, adding layers and density that function as an artistic memoir on her family history. For her exhibition at MMoCA, the artist further pushes her work into the dimensional realm, isolating specific objects within the photographs and printing them on thick Sintra board or re-creating them by hand in porcelain.

From collected photograph, to print and collage, to porcelain object, Buie’s iterative process transforms her memories into something increasingly textured and dimensional. Through her art, Buie critically examines and pays homage to her history, physically conjuring her past with an optimistic look towards the future.

The artist’s practice is intimately tied to her memories of growing up in Chicago and Milwaukee during the 1980s and 1990s. From a young age, Buie experienced familial instability and domestic transience. Shuffled from family member to family member, from foster home to group home, she began to rely on the one constant in her life: making art. Regardless of the precariousness of the world around her, she could find refuge, permanence, and strength in the act of creating. Now an innovative and accomplished printmaker, Buie reclaims her past through her artwork, creating prints and installations that allow her to relocate a sense of home and belonging.

Tyanna Buie has shown work at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, The Haggerty Museum of Art, Racine Art Museum, N’NAMDI Center for Contemporary Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Wisconsin Art. In 2012, Buie received an emerging artist Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and is the recipient of the 2015 Love of Humanity Award from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and the prestigious 2015 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI.

Buie is currently living in Detroit, MI where she is Assistant Professor/Section Chair of Printmaking at the College for Creative Studies.