APRIL BEY / BIO

April Bey (b. 1987) grew up in the Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles as a visual artist and art educator. She is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College.

Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, post-colonialism Speculative futurism/surrealism and Blerd culture.

Bey’s two-dimensional mixed media works and installations are from her ongoing Atlantica series. Bey incorporates fur, glitter, vinyl and woven textiles—materials rich in queerness—to craft icons around the images of real-life figures from her community.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Nevada Museum of Art, Reno NV; The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA, among others. It has been included in group exhibitions at The Modern Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; The Southwestern Center for Contemporary Art, NC; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Portland State University, Portland, OR; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA; The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas; New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans, LA, among others. Her work is in the public collections of California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT; Escalette Collection, Chapman University, Orange, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau, The Bahamas; Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Fullerton College Art Gallery, Fullerton, CA, among others. She is represented by Tern Gallery in Nassau, Bahamas and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

Join Art + Practice on November 8 for a talk with Bahamian raised, LA-based multidisciplinary artist and educator April Bey. Bey will discuss the ideas addressed in her Made in Space series, which explores female and queer afrofuturistic millennial entrepreneurialism via social media and the Internet. Blerdy in nature, juxtapositions of Star Trek and hip-hop culture also manifest in this series. Looking to the future acts as a therapeutic excretory practice in dealing with current day issues around race and discrimination globally. She will touch on the British colonization of West Africa and The Bahamas in comparison to the current Chinese colonization of black countries. This work is a focus but is part of a generalized exploration of the actual resilience of women as they navigate through high-impact experiences of the body, psyche and demands of womanhood. There’s an ironic hypocrisy in the expectations of women and specifically black women to be sovereign and robust while at the same time inept and emotionally weak/unpredictable when leadership roles are sought.