Negarra A. Kudumu works simultaneously as a healer, essayist, curator, and independent scholar of contemporary art. She engages with pre- and post-colonial artistic and spiritual outputs of West and West Central Africa, the Americas, and South Asia.

She is interested in cultural products as evidence of in tact connectivity to indigenous knowledge systems and pre-existing non-western cultural canons. Negarra investigates the ways in which contemporary makers continue to adapt their ancestral knowledge and technologies - consciously and subconsciously - and (re)invigorate generative discourses around art, trauma, healing, liberation, spirituality, and sexuality.

Negarra earned a BA from Dartmouth College and her MA from Leiden University. She holds the title of Yayi Nkisi Malongo (priestess) in the Brama Con Brama lineage of the Afro-Cuban spiritual tradition Palo Mayombe. She is a lay practitioner in the Pimienta lineage of the Afro-Cuban, Lukumi spiritual tradition. Negarra is also a level II Reiki practitioner and herbalist. She lives and works in Seattle where she is Manager of Public Programs at the Frye Art Museum.

Learn more here - Social Media - IG: @negarraakudumu, Twitter: @negarraakudumu, FB: facebook.com/NegarraAKudumu 

Mike Wagner, Mike, seated exposed breast (hyper sexualized), 2018, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of artist.

Lina Iris Viktor, The Dark Continent Series, No 09, 2016. Image courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery