Shape of My Heart: Solo Exhibition @ Allens Lane Art Center
The exhibition draws heavily on recent works completed in 2023-24. These are contrasted with several earlier works, which help to tell the story of her evolving aesthetic that has developed over the last 40 years of her career.
Utilizing hand-painted and printed papers, photo transfers of family images, markings of African writing scripts, and symbolism, Nii-Owoo constructs layered, complex, and captivating works of collage, painting, and mixed media sculptures. The saturated and rich color and the carefully composed and balanced pictorial space found in her work evoke a range of emotions.
Nii-Owoo’s work is an ongoing investigation of history’s influence on our lives, the power of myth and symbol, and the complexity of family dynamics and ancestry. In 1978, during her graduate studies at the Institute of African Studies in Accra, Ghana, she began to explore and incorporate into her work various traditional African spiritual symbols and written scripts. These continue to resonate and have become a part of her works’ spiritual vocabulary.
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