Bio

Shiloah Symone Coley (b. 1998) welcomes her viewers to re-write and interrogate existing narratives with her. What once started as a collection of audio recordings and visual archives to document a collective familial re-memory of intergenerational Black womanhood in her comics, has morphed into an exploration and what constitutes the “self” via fragmentation and collage. She utilizes paint, found objects, and fabrics to explore the abundance of objects, people, and narratives that constitute the self and the plethora of selves that might exist. Working in this manner allows her to deconstruct and reconstruct a truer portrait of a person. Present in her work are motifs of childhood traumas and joys, grief, and displacement. Her studio practice is inseparable from her community work rooted in making the arts more accessible through community-centered public projects and art programming with youth. She is particularly committed to using art as a tool for liberation and agency-activation with marginalized youth. This has led her to design and facilitate art programming primarily centered on identity and cross-cultural understanding with Play Africa, the Madison Children’s Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has worked with court-involved youth, and continues to advocate with other incarcerated populations through her work with the Justice Arts Coalition. She is pursuing her MFA in Studio Art in Washington, D.C. at American University. 

Artist Statement

My work challenges the idea of portraiture capturing one moment in time and expands it to consider how a person cannot be defined by one image, but consists of a plethora of images, objects, and materials from the past and present. This is particularly and especially true for Black women. A few tropes and a plethora of stereotypes exist in the historical canon of cultural representations of Black women. 

What does it mean to not be a single story, but a plethora of narratives intertwining and intersecting? At first, this was most clearly present in the seemingly seamless “code-switching.” I watched my mother and Wanna (maternal grandmother) navigate in different spaces as a means for survival. While code-switching may be the way we present ourselves in different spaces, I began to wonder what the long-term implications of this are on the mind and psyche. How does one amend their own identities and their intersections as their authentic self in relation to the perceived-self?

I began to look inward, interrogating the identities I hold as an Afro-Caribbean woman whose lineage is interwoven with recent immigrants and those who have generationally been in this country, which has led me to interrogate the construct of American Blackness in my ongoing research. 

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