Quinn Hunter: Addressing Black Erasure in Historic and Contemporary Spaces

Join us at 6pm on Saturday, March 6th for a talk by contemporary artist Quinn Alexandria Hunter, exhibiting at Praxis Fiber Workshop through February 28. Quinn Hunter contends with erasure of Black bodies from historic and contemporary spaces and looks at the way erasure of historic labor is connected to the contemporary and how it affects space around us. Using Art and memory to combat erasure, Hunter contextualizes space and land as part of our collective living memory.

Presenter Bio: Quinn Alexandria Hunter is a sculptor and performance artist from North Carolina who completed her MFA work at Ohio University. She works primarily with hair and the African American female body as material. Quinn is interested in the erasure of history from spaces and how the contemporary uses of space impacts the way we as a culture see the past. Her work negotiates between the self and the world.

Hunter’s practice is contending with the false narratives of a romanticized past and interrupting them by laying a truth next to them. Using hair weave, a material that is culturally, socially, and physically connected to the Black female body to make her objects, she is connecting the Black female labor and pain to a space and time that it is contemporarily being erased.  Through making Hunter remembers them and is re-inscribing their labor back into place in the heart of Appalachia where the underground railroad once ran. Quinn is a recipient of the  I. Hollis Parry/Ann Parry Billman Award (2019), The International Sculpture Center’s 2019 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture (2019) and currently the 2020-2021 Artist in residence at Wayne State University.