Maya Freelon Asante - Biography 

Hailed by the International Review of African American Art as "An Artist to Watch", Maya Freelon Asante is an award-winning visual artist who has been influenced and mentored by artistic visionaries, Emma Amos and Faith Ringgold. Exploring of the boundaries of mixed-media, Asante infuses vibrant tissue paper with printmaking, photography, collage and sculpture to create an array of color saturated imagery, which has been praised by Philadelphia City Paper as "joyous and spectacular". Asante's bold designs utilize tissue ink in order to accentuate her emotive subjects, which often include strength, unity, growth, and ancestral reverence.

Awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2006, Asante's artwork has also received acclaim from the Boston News Network television station, and international poet laureate, Maya Angelou, who stated, "She observes and visualizes the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being".

In 2007, Maya Freelon Asante graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with a Master's of Fine Art and began teaching at Morgan State University and Towson University in Baltimore, MD. She has worked with distinguished artist and scholar, Deborah Willis and helped coordinate the second African and African American Art and Film Conference, entitled "Here and Now", which was held at New York University. Asante was also invited to Ghana by Renee Neblett, founder of the Kokrobitey Institute, as an artist-in-residence for their International Printmaking Workshop.

Philadelphia's historic Brandywine Workshop hosted Maya Freelon Asante as a Young Artist Fellow in the Fall of 2008 where she worked with Founder and President, Allan Edmunds on a limited edition print entitled ‘Look Down On War', which is a tribute to her great-grandfather, artist and educator, Allan Freelon, Sr. In the Spring of 2009, she was the Visiting Artist Fellow for the Sonja Haynes Stone Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. As an advocate for arts education, Maya Freelon Asante worked with the Communiversity Program during her residency at UNC and conducted several workshops facilitated through her creative arts collaborative, Make Your Mark Art. Asante will continue her outreach efforts during her exhibition ‘The Beauty of Now', at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, MD, where she now resides.

Maya Freelon Asante - Artist Statement

In 2005 I discovered a stack of brightly colored tissue paper tucked away in my grandmother's basement. After unfolding the tissue, I noticed that water leaked onto the paper and left an intricate stain. This event inspired a shift in my creative process. A few weeks after I started working with tissue paper, Hurricane Katrina began bearing down on the Gulf Coast and I witnessed "water moving color" literally, the power of nature, and the neglect of a nation. The sheer magnitude of the destruction and the remaining marks of flooding struck a direct connection to my artwork.

Over the past four years I have worked with "bleeding" tissue paper, witnessing its deterioration. In and out of water, ripped and pieced back together, thrown, stepped on, forgotten and remembered. The union of the tissue fragments is rooted in my familial quilt-making heritage and the tradition of preservation and resourcefulness. Since I haven't discarded a single sheet, each piece speaks to me as a memory of existence and resilience. Independently, a torn piece of paper seems like a scrap of trash, but once unified with others, the force is overwhelming. Reflecting on the beauty and diversity of the African diaspora, my Tissue Paper Sculptures scale the wall and demand attention. Fragments of familiar faces stare down from above and beam with strength and solidarity. It was during my residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where I fully committed to exploring every aspect of tissue paper, which led to the development of Tissue Ink Monoprints.

Tissue Ink Monoprints are created by saturating the tissue paper with water, thus releasing the ink from the fiber; the tissue is then pressed on to a heavy weight paper, which absorbs the bright ink permanently. Much like a discarded cocoon from an emerging butterfly, the Tissue Paper Sculptures give birth to the Tissue Ink Monoprints. This sacrifice is honored as the ephemeral paper hangs freely on the wall with power and dignity.  The Tissue Ink Monoprints represent a recorded history of formation, which pays homage to the stains it now bears.

As an artivist, I contemplate global issues of war, poverty, waste, ageing and beauty, searching for what fuels our desire to preserve or protect. Memories, like flood marks, are records of something that once was. Giving reverence to my ancestors and meditating on the beauty of now, my art represents the freedom to create challenging work with an objective of universal peace and understanding. The peace starts with the community in which I'm sharing my work; interaction is ever present and essential.

My most recent work has led me to combine the grounded complexity of Monoprints, with the familiarity of family photographs. I had the opportunity to experiment with this technique during my residency at the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, PA. There I produced Mono/Photo Prints on a much larger scale and was assisted with offset lithography and large format digital printing. For me Tissue paper brings freedom and light, while photography allows for personal connection and unity. The synergistic bond of the two represents a wholeness that we all seek.