Maya Freelon
About the Artist
Maya Freelon is an award-winning artist best known for her lively, colorful paper sculptures, made primarily from tissue paper. Her godmother, Maya Angelou, described her work as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being."For the past decade, Freelon has experimented with familiar, inexpensive materials such as tissue paper and glue as part of her dedication to making “art that’s inclusive, art that’s accessible and art that helps bridges.” As the daughter of an architect father and jazz singing mother, she learned skill, focus, and wild improvisation, as well as art’s potential to make our everyday lives more joyful. She values venues and commissions that expose her work to large, diverse audiences, and believes an internet router is as deserving of artistic attention as a gallery wall.
In addition to museum exhibitions, she has produced work for Google and Cadillac, and the Smithsonian, as well as for hotels, healthcare facilities, and government embassies. Her art has a wide, popular appeal and been featured in Cosmopolitan Magazine, Ebony Magazine, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, and Modern Luxury Magazine.
Artist's Website
About the Work
Freelon discovered her favorite medium of tissue paper monoprint by a happy accident. While she was an art student she lived with her grandmother, Queen Mother Frances J. Pierce, and one day came across some tissue paper tucked away in the basement. Influenced by her grandmother, who came from a family of sharecroppers ("who never got their fair share") and had been an elementary school teacher for thirty years, she never wasted anything. A water leak had caused the colors in the tissue paper to bleed."It was a metaphor for finding beauty in the simplest form, the fragility of life," reflects Freelon. It is also a way to honor her grandmother, who has been a constant source of inspiration and support, and whose favorite sayings often provide Freelon with the titles for her artwork.
Since that day, Freelon has mined the creative possibilities of tissue paper. It’s a choice guided by politics as well as aesthetics. When Freelon uses this humble material in the high art context of museums and galleries, she challenges paradigms of power and honors the creative potential of every member of a community. "I am because we are," she insists, and has worked with groups of people to create collaborative "tissue quilts" in homage to African American quilting bees. To create Begin/Again, Freelon started with vibrantly dyed tissue paper. While the tissue was still wet, it was pressed into an absorbent paper then spun on a pottery wheel, creating a visual vortex of braided colors.
From the Artist
Visitor Reflections
Dr. Jennifer Keene, Dean of Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
Dr. Angelica Allen, Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Africana Studies Minor
Artists generally have no issues incorporating the spiritual impulses that fuel so much of their work. The creative process can, at times, involve a very personal and deep spiritual journey which emanates from the universal human condition of overcoming pain. In Maya Freelon’s piece, the work feels like the spiritual and material act of what it means to transform, or to “Begin/Again” as the artist poignantly evokes. The maze of details in this piece pushes the viewer to attend closely to the individual decisions that were made in order to bear witness to a form of truth telling that is being revealed. The softness of the tissue in the center stands in contrast to the striking colors from which it radiates from. The work is materially transgressive in that it has the unique ability to remain delicate and not disintegrate despite the forces of fluorescent pigments that surrounds the tissue. The end result is a vibrant beautiful expression which perhaps, is a fitting metaphor for the journey towards personal transformation.While mesmerizing and captivating to witness, the reality is that the process of personal transformations are a grotesque and brutal journeys. Much like the enduring metaphor for the shape shifting butterfly which develops its wings for eventual flight, transformations are very much a part of life’s journeys and its continuous unfolding. On a personal level, I learned about the power of personal transformation after losing eight family members in a close succession within a four year period. These familial losses paradoxically stymied my writing process and sharpened my ethnographic insights as I conducted fieldwork research among the descendants of African American military men in the Philippines who were also dealing with loss in various forms. These losses also pushed me to think about the role of spirituality in my intellectual and scholarly work. For my personal transformation to occur, a commitment towards a deeper self-understanding, finding my own voice, and expressing my truth was needed. This is a similar self-discovery project that I see and more importantly feel from Freelon’s piece which provokes the aesthetics of personal transformation through the visual metaphor of what it means to “Begin/Again.”
