Meet the Artist Inspired by Life in NYC Public Housing for New Exhibition

NEW YORK - Rezul -- Kimberly M. Becoat is a contemporary mixed media artist whose work is a stylistic abstraction with a conceptual investigation of new materials and visual experiences with social commentary. She uses a variety of art materials including acrylic paint, sumi ink, and watercolour as well as less conventional items like sand, tar paper, foil, candy wrappers and other detritus. Her most recent abstract and conceptual work is an investigation of urban environments meant to create "urban displacement", such as in public housing – aimed to surgically remove "massive amounts of Blacks and Latinos" into designated forgotten pockets of city landscapes in URBANIA, her current solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, New York through June 19, 2022 curated by Amy Andrieux.

URBANIA is a thoughtful investigation consisting of 16 original pieces invoking urban displacement through the intimate lens of the artist's childhood in NY City Public Housing, specifically Lexington Houses in East Harlem. Using Black cultural production as a mechanism for reclamation, viewers are afforded the artist's undeniable social commentary on liberation, cultural preservation, and her insatiable call to restorative play. URBANIA, like a beacon of nostalgia, instigates a reflective contemplation on the public versus private representations of our cultural production for the deliberate purpose of setting us all free.

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"These colors become their own conversations. They become maps and connectivity when we talk about them. All of the sensory, all of the energy...that is what I'm looking at - (so) now we're talking about a connection not only to the code of the hood, but a code of aesthetics," shares Becoat in response to her conception of URBANIA.

Becoat has been a consistent voice in the contemporary Black arts movement, most notably centering her practice on excavating the oft-ignored history and contributions of Black life in New York City. From her work on the 19th-century African American settlement, Seneca Village, through to URBANIA.

Featured exhibitions for Becoat include the current solo exhibition URBANIA at MoCADA Museum in New York, Welcome to Urbania at RUSH Arts Gallery, NY (solo exhibit), New Abstractions at Essie Green Galleries (solo exhibit) and Capital One Bank in NY, The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and Deutsche Bank. Other notable exhibitions include Last Supper, Latchkey Gallery, NY; Creative Climate Award Art Nominee, Human Impacts Institute, NY; Prizm Fair, Miami, FL.; In Plain Sight/Site, and ArtSpace, New Haven. Her work has also appeared on television shows including Insecure on HBO; the Netflix Original Series, Luke Cage; and the FX series, The Americans.

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Kimberly M. Becoat URBANIA is on view April 22 - June 19, 2022. For more information about the exhibition, visit: https://mocada.org/kimberly-m-becoat-urbania