Event
Real Wall
Bethani Blake
Real Art Ways presents artwork by Bethani Blake
Blake translates a present day world which depicts personal nostalgia, recontextualizing appropriated and personal images. A first generation Black person in an immediate family of white Americans, she grew up surrounded by iconography and other paraphernalia specific to American culture and first-world consumption. Conflicting agency as a consequence of existing between contradictory circumstances, she chooses to acknowledge this connection which drives her to depict an experience in contemporary society with subject matter related to cultural movements specific to the turn of the twenty-first century and present day.
Her practice involves the systematic curation of information which is accessed through the Internet and interpersonal communication. From music to video games, fandom, and social issues, she creates visual work which investigates her relationship to the imagery. Blake is most interested in the collapsing of time, how information intersects conceptually, and the irony of her position in the work she is investigating.
About the Artist
Bethani Blake (b. 1999) is an artist, curator, and educator based in Hartford, CT. She received her B.F.A in Painting and Performing Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2021 and has exhibited work in Connecticut. Georgia, and Ohio. Blake is currently the Amistad Associate Curator for the African Diaspora at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art where she organizes exhibitions and heads an artist residency.
