Imna Arroyo
New London, CT
Imna Arroyo is an Afro-Puerto Rican artist whose work weaves the threads of heritage and ecological veneration into a contemporary artistic dialogue.
Message
Salvador de Bahia, Brazil in the Summer of 2014 was a significant landmark along the path upon which Imna Arroyo had embarked many years before - it is a spiritual journey, where the artistic and the intellectual are intertwined in a seamlessly distinct evolution.
Bahia’s African cultural traditions derived from Candomblé, have played an important role in the formation of Afro-Brazilian ethnic identity. Candomblé's ritual celebrations presented new interpretations of the Yoruba traditions that Imna Arroyo has practiced for many years. It was during this trip that she was inspired while witnessing one of these ritual performances, where its meaning, “IROKO, the Tree of Life” was revealed to her.
Thus, sprouted the seedling of her extended Iroko multimedia installation which, like a tree beginning as a sapling, grows - sprouting branches which in turn sprout branches of their own. All eventually mature into a living entity, the complex canopy of which remains connected to its original source.
Iroko in Yoruba Land is an Orisha, a deity that lives in the tree also called Iroko. In the Americas, this Orisha lives inside the Ceiba tree. It is the meeting place of the gods, humanity and the ancestors. - Migdalia Salas, 2023
Video:
The accompanying video was created in collaboration with graphic and digital media artist, Tao Chen, and video producer, Jaime Gomez. The video includes visuals of Indigenous people from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of Colombia by Jaime Gomez and videographer Julio Charris as well as traditional Yoruba Orisha songs curated and sung by Lucumi priestesses Amma McKen, Denise Ola DEJean and Swahili Henry and a newly commissioned dance by choreographer by Alycia Bright- Holland performing with Sinque Tavares.
Dimensions: Installation with variable dimensions
Materials: Reed, Clay, Ceramic Glaze, Wood, Paper, Abaca Paper, Ink, Wax, Metal, Beads, Wire.
Contents:
1) House of the Orishas/ Casa de la Orichas
Eleggua, Osain, Ogun & Ochosi, Obbatala. Los Ibegies, Yemaya & Chango
Clay & Encaustics
2014-2017
2) House frame panels: 22, pine wood
3) Houselike panels with prints: 11 woodcut with encaustic
4) Houselike constructions made with handmade paper: 29 handmade abaca fiber, fortage rubbing
5) Plywood pieces: 25 with fortage
8) Reed sculptures:
8) Video: Intended to be seen on a screen 12 x 15 or larger
9) Ceramic sculpture heads: 9
Inspired by the sacred Tree of Life, known as Iroko to the Yoruba people of West Africa and those of the African Diaspora, Yaxché to the Maya, Kapok in Southeast Asia, Silk- Cotton Tree to Indigenous North Americans, and La Ceiba in the Caribbean, Central and South America. The tree is of great symbolic, spiritual, mythological, medicinal, magical, commercial, ecological and aesthetic import. Through the exploration of materials old and new, traditional and innovative technologies this multi-media installation focuses on the mysteries of nature using the Iroko/ Yaxché/ Kapok/ La Ceiba / Silk-Cotton Tree as an anchor to express the power of nature, its continuity and resiliency which hold the promise for a sustainable future if nurtured and honored.
Puerto Rican artist devoted to exploring connections between the African continent and the Diaspora in an on-going endeavor to reclaim a lost and scattered heritage. Arroyo draws upon the imagery, symbolism and language of the Yoruba traditions of Africa to express a majestically complex and sophisticated worldview. In her multidisciplinary practice, she finds inspiration in the concept that art-making can be a ritualized form of healing.
"It is my intent to create Art that heals the deep-seated collective wounds of history, as well as to celebrate the vibrancy and relevance of a long denied ancestral legacy of self-expression", Imna Arroyo
Renowned scholar and Caribbean art and cultural critic, Yolanda Wood writes “… Imna Arroyo remains continually focused on those junctures where everything that is located outside the practices of hegemonic power, in the domains of the undervalued and subaltern, somehow meets. Settling within the space/time of these multiple references, she has inserted her own poetics based on life stories, autobiographical details, gender imprints, and the memories that inhabit them, all inscribed on the skin and in the reflections of the African subjects enslaved in times of modernity/coloniality and their descendants—which in fact we all are—and whose condition of existence the Barbadian writer George Lamming has identified as “a historical experience” in the Caribbean, yet one that certainly extends beyond the dominion of the plantations. From her migrant status, yet the bearer of a U.S. passport, Arroyo has succeeded in penetrating these silenced and hidden areas”.