Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999)

Kemper Museum is pleased to present Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999). This landmark retrospective is the first in the United States dedicated to the work of Belkis Ayón—the late Cuban visual artist who mined the founding myth of the Afro-Cuban fraternal society, Abakuá, to create an independent and powerful visual iconography.

Ayón’s signature technique was collography, a printing process in which materials of various textures and absorbencies are collaged onto a cardboard matrix and then run through the press with paper. Her narrative works, many of which were produced at very large scale by joining multiple printed sheets, are imbued with an air of mystery, in part due to her deliberately austere palette of shades and subtle tones of black, white, and gray. For a black Cuban woman, both her ascendency in the contemporary printmaking world and her investigation of a powerful all-male brotherhood were notable and bold. Nkame, a sweeping overview of her most fertile period of artistic creativity, covers Ayón’s graphic production from 1986 until her untimely passing in 1999. 

Curated by Cristina Vives, the exhibition was organized by the Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba. Exhibition tour management by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website