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Tsedaye Makonnen is a multidisciplinary artist whose studio, curatorial, and research-based practice threads together her identity as a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, a Black American woman, doula, and a mother. Makonnen invests in the transhistorical forced migration of Black communities across the globe and Feminism. Her work is both an intimate memorialization and a protective sanctuary for Black lives.
Tsedaye Makonnen is the recent recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, DC Public Library Maker Residency, and Art on the Vine’s Savage-Lewis Artist Residency (Martha's Vineyard). She has performed at the Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, Chale Wote (Ghana), El Museo del Barrio, Fendika (Ethiopia), FIAP (Martinique), Queens Museum, the Smithsonian’s and more. Her light monuments memorializing Black womxn exhibited at the August Wilson Center and National Gallery of Art. In 2019 she was on the front cover of the Washington City Paper's People Issue. She recently curated a group show with Washington Project for the Arts in DC titled Black Women as/and the Living Archive and is publishing an exhibition book. This August she is exhibiting for Park Avenue Armory’s ‘100 Years | 100 Women’ with NYU Tisch & Deb Willis, which was recently featured in Vogue Magazine.
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SENAIT & NAHOM | THE PEACEMAKER & THE COMFORTER, 2019
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Senait & Nahom. The Peacemaker & The Comforter, 2019
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Many of Makonnen's thematic concerns relating to migration and transnational Black experiences come together in Senait & Nahom. The towers are composed of individual mirrored cubes, each of which bears the name of a Black womxn whose lives have been cut short by systemic and institutionalized racism, patriarchy and through forced migration. Tsedaye uses the names of 50 Black womxn for the 50 illuminated cubes, each of which is accompanied by a written booklet memorializing the lives of these womxn.
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Astral Sea Series
Astral Sea is an extension of Tsedaye Makonnen’s work on forced migration and state-sanctioned violence. The textile works are adorned with hundreds of laser-cut mirrored pieces obtained from her light sculpture series. These reflective segments are the negative spaces of the Coptic crosses carved out of the sculptures. Tsedaye arranges them into abstracted Ethiopian Coptic crosses and other Black spiritual and cultural iconography that offer ancestralmemories, healing, and protection, such as Haitian Veves and Kongolese Cosmograms. Makonnen has used Astral Sea I, II, and III in several performances to activate the objects and honor the womxn who are memorialized in her work. These textiles represent water to her and the mirror pieces represent the bodies that have drowned at sea and exist in the wake of the Black Atlantic & the Black Mediterranean.
Tsedaye Makonnen at UNTITLED, ART ONLINE | Booth A5
Past viewing_room