artist statement
I am a multidisciplinary artist, who’s interested in using different mediums that allow me to critically explore a speculative future, while honoring and paying homage to a past which is based on personal experiences and memories. There is a focus on intersectional Blackness and the celebration of Black life in its totality, with an emphasis on Ancestral lineages, Land preservation and African American contributions to the Black diasporaic culture.
These explorations include reimagining language and letterforms, upholding cultural symbology, as well as highlighting African retentions in the Southern United States.
I make work to amplify, preserve, protect and project Blackness into a future free from systemic oppression.
BIO
Cedric Umoja-Day is a multidisciplinary artist based in Columbia, South Carolina. His interests revolve around self determination, symbolism and memory. He was born in San Francisco, California. His family moved to Hopkins, South Carolina when he was a child. This would prove to have a profound impact upon his life and world view. As he grew, he would continue to travel back and forth between the two regions experiencing the dichotomy of the west and south while negotiating these spaces with amazement, curiosity, wonder and reverence. The use of reimagined language and letter forms, gathered materials, archetypal totem structures and ritual performance allows him to bridge past, present and future in his work, which is important to his artistic practice. His influences include Edell Willingham, Betye Saar, Carlos Ramirez, Max Beckmann, Rammellzee and Jack Whitten. He attended the Art Institute of Atlanta, much later he apprenticed with Tony Cacalano, a Yale MFA, professor and veteran artist.
His work features a combination of Post Graffiti , Expressionism , Afrofuturism, Post Modernism and Magic Realism. He has exhibited work in museums and galleries in the South, Southeast and Mid West regions of the US. He has collaborated with and been commissioned by Cirque Du Soleil, Lu Lu Lemon, City of Charleston, City of Columbia, University of South Carolina, Columbia Museum of Art and The Watering Hole poetry organization.
