APRIL BEY / BIO

Blair Meadows Photography

April Bey grew up in The Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles, CA as a visual artist and art educator. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism Speculative futurism 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.

Bey’s work has been exhibited by and is in the collection of The California African American Museum, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Escalette Collection, The 21C Museum, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, and more.

Bey is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College.

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.