Kay Reese: 50 Million African Trees

Marité & Joe Robinson Strolling Gallery I
February 23, 2024–May 24, 2024

Kay Reese, an alumna of Gallery Aferro’s Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity Artist in Residency Program, addresses the history of slavery and issues of race, identity, and power through her assemblages, collages, and prints. She reassembles and recombines seemingly disparate elements as a means to investigate collective truth, reality, desire, and freedom. She explains, “In breaking down found objects loaded with our social and cultural DNA, I am questioning our value constructs, lies, rifts, and the subversions that produced them.” Over the past few years, Reese has shifted her practice and challenged herself to use abstraction to tell a story.

This exhibition showcases photo-based digital collages from Reese’s series “50 Million African Trees,which she created as artist-in-residence at the Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University – Newark. This body of work was inspired by Kenyan activist Wangarĩ Maathai (1940–2011), the first Black African woman to win the Nobel Prize for the Environment. Featuring fractured imagery and contrasting colors, these works celebrate Maathai’s planting of 50 million trees and her fight for Kenyan women’s rights. Working in a Surrealist vein, Reese intends to emotionally impact viewers while connecting to local environmental issues.

Kay Reese Intervention, 2020 Photo-based digital collage printed with archival ink on lustre photo paper 30 x 24 in

Kay Reese, Intervention, 2020, Photo-based digital collage printed with archival ink on lustre photo paper, 30 x 24 in.

Kay Reese Emergence, 2020 Photo-based digital collage printed with archival ink on lustre photo paper 30 x 24 in.

Kay Reese, Emergence, 2020, Photo-based digital collage printed with archival ink on lustre photo paper, 30 x 24 in.