"Awakening" or "Nourish" By Cheryl R. Riley

Artist Statement

For three decades, the “Glyphs”, were shapes that I integrated into my wall art and site-specific mural commissions. During an artist residency at Oxbow in the Fall of 2018, they evolved into a visual vocabulary exploration of language as a reflection of societal character and structure. I unearthed their meanings by learning about matriarchal societies. Knowing that the highest fatalities from every war are women and children. This knowledge began their transformation into an Afro Futurist visual vocabulary. This is now the language of an imagined, advanced extra-terrestrial, matriarchal, matrilineal, agrarian and peaceful civilization for which I am creating a codex. During my James Weldon Johnson residency and since, I painted several hundred unique iterations on pages of a 1957 encyclopedia using gouache and metallic ink. Choosing an encyclopedia page to paint, I do not consider or focus on the text or definitions, only choosing those which do not incorporate images that are too distracting, yet as is the case with humans, connections can be drawn. Recently, the BADG (Black Artists and Designers Guild) to which I belong started a project called the Obsidian and for my space, I envisioned a kaleidoscopic projection. After some research, we were thrilled to discover software that transforms my Glyphs into the beautiful Kaleidoscope circular shapes offered for the James Weldon Johnson Foundation fundraiser.