April Bey

April Bey (born 1987 in The Bahamas) is a Bahamian-American artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores Blackness, queerness, feminism, postcolonialism, popular culture, and speculative futures. Working across mixed-media painting, textiles, printmaking, photography, video, and installation, Bey examines American and Bahamian culture through vibrant materials, satirical language, and the imagined extraterrestrial world of Atlantica.  Bey received a BFA in drawing from Ball State University in 2009 and an MFA in painting from California State University, Northridge, in 2014. Her work often engages Afrofuturism, Afro-Surrealism, social media, generational theory, Blerd culture, and systems of racial and colonial power, using woven textiles, faux fur, glitter, vinyl, photography, collage, and hand-printed imagery to construct affirming representations of Black women and queer communities.  Her work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, National Gallery of Victoria, Getty Museum, National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Her work is held in collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California African American Museum, National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, and Center for Contemporary Printmaking. April Bey lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is also a tenured professor at Glendale College.