Bio

Yoland Skeete is an American photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia artist of Caribbean descent. She attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City for film and photography, studied anthropological filmmaking under Jean Rouche at Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and earned an MFA from Hunter College, NY. She is co-founder of the award-winning Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts Center in Newark and author of When Newark Had a Chinatown: My Personal Journey. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Queens Museum of Art, New York; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Museum of Contemporary Arts and Crafts, New York; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Jersey; and Husby Konsthalle, Stockholm, Sweden. Skeete’s work in two and three-dimensions explore memory, identity, and history. They frequently combine photography, embroidery, painting, movement, and music. She often begins with her own well-documented family history and her experience as a Trinidadian American woman whose ancestors are African, Chinese, and Scottish. Her innovative use of documentary photography, combined with her own genealogical research, and her use of family portraits provoke a kind of time travel in their kaleidoscopic tunneling of history into personal, lived experience. Nina Brouet: Great Grandmother of the Cane and Ancestors (both in the collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers) draw from her family’s long history in the Americas. In Nina Brouet, a ghostly representation of Skeete's great grandmother standing in the family’s field of sugar cane is juxtaposed with an abstract, hovering self-portrait signifying her family’s relationship to their land, the past, the present, and by implication, the future. In Ancestors, Skeete's self-portrait in the guise of an African mask, similarly dissolves into an image of a verdant tangle of vegetation, suggesting the unbreakable bonds between land and people. Skeete, like many Americans, traces her past through multiple generations of immigrants and draws upon their traditions to create images that embody notions of deep time, connections between generations, and hope for the future. Other works, for example, Cape of Memory, draw more generally from the painful histories of the Americas ravaged by the colonial powers of Europe--slavery, forced migration, and back-breaking labor. Designed to be worn by anyone who wishes to exorcise this past and gain resilience and strength, the cape’s imagery references the slave trade, indentured servitude, sugar plantations, global travel in search of opportunity, and disappearance. Sewn, printed, and drawn on the cape, these images encourage a psychic engagement with a painful past to enable the wearer to acknowledge, heal, and move forward. This painful past is not simply as exorcism for those who are victims of colonial violence; those who perpetrated that violence needs to acknowledge, heal, and move forward as well. In coming to know and accept that these histories are part of our shared legacy as Americans in the twenty-first century, we strengthen our own hearts and make it possible to move together toward a brighter future. As Skeete understands, art as shared experience is our best hope, it begins to look like our only hope.

Donna Gustafson, Independent Curator, Critic, Writer