BIOGRAPHY
Alexandria Eregbu is an artist and curator whose hybrid practice spans across art, music, education, justice, and humanities to consider objects, stories, and experiences that dignify creativity and Black life.
Her visual artwork employs a combination of symbols, folklore, and performance to make real the continuum of everyday practice in African-American existence. Often Alexandria utilizes materials like chalk, indigo, cowrie shells, wood, and feathers amongst processes like natural dye, drawing and quilting to make meaning with the unseen. She creates textiles, paintings, sculpture, installation, performance, sound, and other time-based media as a bridge to nature, design, healing, and ecology.
As a DJ also known as IJEOMA, Alexandria works with music and other collected recordings to create dynamic sound experiences that uplifts poetry, diaspora, and resistance. Amongst IJEOMA’s favorite genres are amapiano, afrobeats, house music, electronic, r&b, soul, kuduro, and gqom.
As a scholar and educator, Alexandria references Afrosurrealist discourse, archives, oral narratives, and craft traditions to both interpret and call into question omissions of femme, Afro, and indigenous histories in pedagogy in the United States. Currently, Alexandria serves as a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the department of Fiber & Material Studies.
Alexandria’s work has appeared on screen in Candyman (2021) directed by Nia DaCosta, in print and on the internet. Her writing has been published by the University of Chicago Press, Sixty Inches From Center, Terremoto Magazine, Candor Arts, and Green Lantern Press. She has presented work in partnership with MacArthur Foundation, Independent Curators International, the College Art Association of America, EXPO Chicago, Soho House, Stony Island Arts Bank, Southside Community Art Center, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, the University of Oregon’s Art + Design, Yale Union, the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Poets House, the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, Casa Rosada in Salvador, Brazil, the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, among others.
photo courtesy of Raymond Abercrombie (@sonlomac)
Transforming the Way We Learn in Community
For over a decade, Alexandria has worked as an educator within the city of Chicago. On a fundamental level, Alexandria believes that art-making is the most essential function of community. As such, Alexandria’s practice has been most dedicated to supporting creative experiences that uplift audiences engaging the arts. Her early interests in civic engagement were initially fostered in 2014 through her involvement with Teens Reimagine Art, Community, and Environment (TRACE)— a youth activism program facilitated through the Chicago Park District. Part of her contributions to the program included co-founding the Community Curatorial Project where she has served for eight years enriching teen leadership. She formerly served as Assistant Director of Education at alt_ Chicago.
On Lifestyle as Curatorial Practice
In 2015, Alexandria birthed FINDING IJEOMA (formerly known as ‘The Finding Ijeoma Project’) at the Chicago Cultural Center where she opened her studio to the public for 7 months. Celebrating art, community, and personal heritage, Alexandria programmed events with local artists, organizations, and collectives that highlighted her joy of poetry, music, wellness, textiles and fashion, learning, collaboration, and commerce. Since then, FINDING IJEOMA has been a lifestyle platform sharing stories, exhibitions, products, and programs at the intersection of art, music, and community.
On Reimagining Justice and Beloved Community
Most recently, Alexandria produced HOW TO BUILD A QUEENDOM— a group exhibition which invited participating artists to present recent and new works that exemplified shared values fundamental to Black women’s creativity. Amongst artworks, through a series of programs including tarot reading, journaling workshops, yoga classes, live music, reading club and community dinner— the experience served as a forum to probe the following questions from guests and participants:
what are the attributes of a queendom?
who lives in a queendom?
how does society benefit from queendoms?
what are the conditions needed to sustain a queendom?
how do women artists come together to keep creativity, community, and the right to dream sacred?
In this public experience— part dream, part forum, part exhibition, HOW TO BUILD A QUEENDOM continues to strive to address principal practices, concerns, and aesthetics held amongst women, femmes, and non-binary artists in order to establish new visions driven by love, legacy, and longevity.
In 2019, Alexandria held a two year position as Curator for Illinois Humanities' city-wide initiative, Envisioning Justice— a nationally recognized exhibition which featured the voices and artwork of local artists, collectives, leaders, and community organizers who came together to address the failures of the U.S. criminal justice system and how mass incarceration impacts Chicago communities.
Previous curatorial projects include— The Annual: A New Exhibition for Chicago Art presented at Chicago Artists Coalition in partnership with EXPO Chicago; Tertiary Dimensions (2015) presented as part of PLATFORMS—a retrospective exhibition celebrating the ten year anniversary of Chicago's queer art collective, Chances Dances; and Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, Revisited (2013)— a group exhibition and the first of its kind to engage the richness of Chicago’s Surrealist past with new works from 13 contemporary artists of the African diaspora.
artist STATEMENT
I believe that cloth functions like a vessel— cloth holds invaluable threads of intelligence, like an inscribed memory… or perhaps more like DNA. My work is an obsession with that information, memory, whether it be embodied, lived, or dreamt. I am frequently cross-examining my understanding of the natural world through sensory-driven concerns, often with a burning and enraged desire to fully interrogate the ancestral histories and traditions that were both stolen and kept secret from me.
My artwork serves as a watery release. The materials that I work with feathers, obsidian, indigo dye, cowrie shells, dried flowers, cotton, linen, fishing nets, all charge these waters. They speak to me and share how long they’ve been traveling. Their textures tell me where they’ve been. Sometimes I can feel what they’re feeling, too. Though I find the conversations with these materials and their stories to be both gratifying and maddening, they help bring my artworks: sculptures, textiles, props, and installations through their beginnings and endings. More typically than not, the work is in some form of opposition with one another— bound by a sort of meeting at a crossroads. the materials i use are the ultimate compass. They guide me through new chapters as old chapters come to a close. sometimes their navigation redirects me to demanding and unforeseen currents.
this current tide has brought me closer to the shores of West Africa. Studying the land, stories, artwork, garments, rituals, and performances, I have found home in the Igbo people’s use of chi, the Leopard Man’s spiral, the body patterns of uli, love letters as chalk drawings, the blue-pigmented textiles of the Yoruba, their orishas, and the power of ritual. This is the Marvelous. Suddenly an entirely magical world awaits before me. I feel like a child lost in rhythmic dance and these sandy waters my curiosity can’t resist.