As part of Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council's exhibition series Art on the Walls, "Owning" features art by LeFawn Barefoot, Victoria R. Hirsh, and Mikael Owunna.
"By reclaiming ourselves as femmes, queer people, and people of color, we project the earth and the universe onto our bodies. In some ways, we ground ourselves to the earth and in other ways we project the stars and the cosmos-emancipating ourselves in turn."
Spoken Word performances by Hannah Eko and Heather Louise Manning
5:30 pm - Hannah Eko is a writer, multi-media storyteller, and MFA candidate who currently resides in Pittsburgh, PA. You can find her work in B*tch and Bust magazines and on Buzzfeed. She enjoys geeking out on Wonder Woman, astrology, and the Divine Feminine. Hannah blogs at hanabonanza.com and enjoys Instagram (@hannah.eko) a little too much. You should ask her about love.
6:30 pm - Heather Louise Manning is a black hillbilly born and raised in the Appalachian region of northwest Pennsylvania. She is an autodidact poet. In addition to writing, Heather studies and teaches Raja yoga. She believes that a mindfulness practice in combination with poetry can connect us to our humanity, shadow, and to our divinity.
LeFawn Barefoot is an interdisciplinary artist whose works are influenced by her Filipino/Jamaican/Transylvanian roots, and growing up brown and weird on the plateau of the Appalachians. Her art is an expression of her commitment to decolonizing mind, religion, and medicine.
The sculpture series “Black and Brown LOVE on the plateau of the Appalachians” is focused on the preservation of Affrilachian culture/experience. It is a celebration of people of color connecting to nature with an emphasis on the importance of rest.
Tori Hirsh is a fourth-year student at Carlow University versed in both digital and traditional arts. She has explored the combination of two entirely different media and she actively challenges herself to learn new technicalities and processes to create the artwork she desires. She has a colorful series of graphic, 3-D renderings as well as fantasy-inspired oil paintings. She has exhibited concepts and designs for a public arts project and curated an exhibition centered around female empowerment open to the public.
Mikael Owunna is an award-winning Nigerian-Swedish artist and photographer, born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA and with degrees in Biomedical Engineering and History from Duke University. His work centers around identity while bending the medium with his engineering background. "Infinite Essence" is Owunna's response to pervasive media images of black people dead and dying. Owunna has set about on a quest to recast the black body as a panorama of magic, life and soul. Owunna hand paints all of his models’ bodies with fluorescent paints. Using his engineering background, he augmented a standard flash with an ultraviolet bandpass filter to only pass ultraviolet light.
Through June, 2019