Laurel Richardson is an interdisciplinary artist based in NYC. She received her MFA degree in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design. Her art and research practice integrates painting and installation and focuses on family lineage, collective histories, and cultural memory centering on African Diaspora history.
Her current work stems from her graduate research in Ghana during the 400 year anniversary of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. She currently teaches at Brooklyn College, and Bard High School Early College, Manhattan.
She danced professionally for modern dance companies including Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble in Denver, CO. and Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre, in Chicago, IL. In Regional Broadway Theatre she performed in The Color Purple and Dreamgirls
In my work the past meets the present. I am charting my personal history and the history of the African Diaspora while also questioning the current and historical representation of bodies of color. I do this by reconnecting lost and unknown connections while reflecting on ideas of emergence, power, and resilience. Through painting, installation, and elements of performance, I produce an interwoven surface of ideas and histories. Using dye, acrylic washes and oil paint, my work loosely references African American quilting, Asante Kente weaving patterns, and Ghanaian batik.
Living in a world of lost, found and crossed connections, I wonder what points connect us. Where there are borders and closed doors to shared understanding, what devices serve as tools for access?
I interrogate these questions through a path of regenerative story telling and narrativization as I sift through inherently political subjects of ancestry, family lineage, migration, cultural memory and identity.