Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle | Kentifrica Is: Re-Imagining Collective Geographies

Artist Lab Residency & Exhibition
January 17 – April 7, 2017
18th Street Arts Center | Main Gallery
Gallery hours: 11am-5pm, Monday-Friday

Los Angeles- and Oakland-based artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle brings her ongoing investigation into auto-ethnography, anthropology, museum studies, and remixing history to the Artist Lab Residency at 18th Street Arts Center from January 17 though April 7, 2017. Hinkle will weave together performance, installation, and collaborative, participatory workshops within a new, site-specific installation. The project connects 18th Street Arts Center and our surrounding Pico Neighborhood with other Los Angeles institutions and community histories to develop a living and breathing archive that thrives off of collaborations with various individuals who come from multiple social, cultural, geographical, and artistic perspectives.

While in residence at 18th Street Art Center, Hinkle will oscillate between re-creating artifacts, conducting performances, producing experimental research, and organizing generative workshops with a variety of LA-based communities, both in the studio and offsite. At the project’s center is an unknown continent and culture called Kentifrica, a meditation upon what can and cannot be mapped when dealing with the ramifications of identity as an elusive anchor. Kentifrica has also evolved into a philosophy for making work through the usage of a Kentifrican proverb, “You got to look where it ain’t,” inspiring others to conduct research and to create from spaces which they initially believed or were told that they could not access due to prior loss and trauma. Using the Kentifrican method of “Looking Where it Ain’t”, Hinkle will develop new forms of storytelling and object-making that affirm cultural presence within Los Angeles communities.