Dreamsong’s solo presentation at Expo Chicago highlights the full range and depth of Ta-coumba T. Aiken’s work, featuring recent paintings, collages, works on paper, prints and sculptures.
Aiken (b. 1952, Evanston, IL) has spent decades channeling the spirit of his ancestors through form and color in works rooted in abstraction. In a recent essay, Senior Walker Art Center curator Siri Engberg described Aiken as “part of a lineage of Black abstract artists who have employed strategies of abstraction as containers for deep meaning, and as explorations of the personal, the historical, and the social.”
A vessel for the collective memory of his community, Aiken begins each painting with intuitive freeform underpaintings that he terms Spirit Writing. Rhythmic and sinuous, his line doubles back on itself in the infinite manner of a Mobius strip, nesting one body or visage inside another. Drawn from the artist’s ancestors, these gestures form the grounds of his work and suggest shared history, community, and experience.
Living and working in St. Paul, Minnesota, Aiken’s tireless work as an artist, activist, and educator has contributed immeasurably to the Twin Cities’ civic and artistic fabric. Aiken’s paintings, drawings, collages and monumental public commissions are held in numerous public collections, including the Walker Art Center, The Minnesota Museum of American Art and Hennepin Theatre Trust. He attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is the recipient of numerous awards including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, a Gottlieb Fellowship and a Bush Visual Arts fellowship.
Ta-coumba T. Aiken
Identity: Lost and Found, 2018
Acrylic on Canvas
36 x 48 in.
Ta-coumba T. Aiken
Identity: Lost and Found, 2018
Acrylic on Canvas
36 x 48 in.
