Eleven is a tri-state based ceremonionalist, author, performance and visual artist. She received her bachelors in fine art from Cooper Union in NYC, and graduated from Arts High School in Newark NJ. She has studied with Birth Right to Africa, Growhouse NYC and Peters Valley School of Craft. Most recently she completed a residency at Paul Robeson Gallery, and represented the city of Newark in an international artist residency in Angola, West Africa. Eleven has received many awards, and residencies throughout her career. She is the founder of C.O.R.E: Cultural Origins, Restoration and Education. An initiative created to bridge art, ancestral education, and spirituality together. Her art works explore what it means to invoke ancestral remembrance through unflinching self assessment through meditation and study of forgotten and erased history.

She has dived in and explored the worlds of ceramics, performance art, poetry, painting, photography, jewelry making, fashion design, fiber dying, book binding, mosaics, and sees all mediums as vehicles to channel expression. While viewing art itself as an ancient healing practice.

She questions, How do we expand our creative endeavors so it captures and revitalizes memory and community all at once to uplift forgotten, silenced, colonized people all over the world.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My artistic practice is an ode to the discovery of self as migration, colonization, and displacement, creates new identities. The mobility of some paintings being on fabric echo the feeling of tapestries and scrolls, meant to be flexible, sacred and easily carried for lighter transport. The element of fibres and textiles represents the identity being made of different parts. Works are joined together through hot glue, resin, and needle and thread. Some works are to be worn and tranf ormed into shoe designs. Each element emphasizes that as we shift, and migrate we carry our stories with us. Paintings are made in Acrylic, Oil Paint, details are added with pens, oil pastels, and fabric. Different symbols, patterns and textures reference ancient civilzations and cultural exploration; this is all to describe the space between ancestral erasure and the innocence of being born anew.
I am painting to help navigate a future where notions of post black, post gender, and post human can be explored. I feel it's necessary to deconstruct these ideas to move forward in a more accurate way.