Malaika Temba

Malaika Temba (born Feb. 22, 1996, in Washington, D.C.) is a Tanzanian-American artist whose textile-based practice explores labor, trade, Black diasporic lineage, gendered care, and the cultural histories embedded in fabric and image-making. Working across analog and digital weaving, tapestry, collage, and textile-based installation, Temba examines intimacy, exploitation, and resilience through layered imagery, symbolic forms, and visual references drawn from contemporary media and found images from Tanzania.  Temba studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later completed an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work often engages globalization, auntie and femme labor, East African marketplaces, craft histories, and the politics of material softness, using weaving, collage, and painted tapestry to consider how care and capitalism become entangled across diasporic and transnational experience. Sources also note that she grew up across Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the United States, a transnational background that shapes her attention to exchange, migration, and cultural hybridity.  Her work has been exhibited at Gaa Gallery, Mindy Solomon Gallery, and in YoungArts presentations, including solo exhibitions such as Ni Hivi Hivi Duniani, This Bridge Called Our Backs, and Sugarcane Is Sweetest at the Joint. She received a YoungArts award in Visual Arts in 2014 and the Jorge M. Pérez Award from YoungArts in 2021. Malaika Temba lives and works in New York.