The Scribe - Page 12

Fellowship Details Beginning January 1, 2026, Sunami will spend three months working in Robinson’s restored Shepard neighborhood home studio. The fellowship includes a $15,000 unrestricted cash award and a community outreach project with the museum. Planned Work During her residency, Sunami plans to create three large-scale mixed media pieces honoring the Yoruba goddesses Yemeja, Oshun, and Oya. The works will incorporate seed beads, stones, glass, and other materials. She also intends to host dialogue sessions, zine-making, and collaborative creative activities. In a statement, Sunami said she has long admired Robinson’s ability to transform buttons, fabric scraps, grease, and everyday materials into what she called “divine vessels of story.” She noted that both her work and Robinson’s treat art as a vehicle for storytelling that excavates histories and mythologies, with a focus on elevating Black women. About the Artist Sunami is a multimedia painter, installation artist, muralist, curator, and teacher based in Columbus. She holds a BA in Art History from Ohio State University and an MA in Art History from Ohio University. Her work centers on mixed-media portraits of Black women, which she describes as both spiritual practice and social commentary. She builds up the surface of her canvases using paper beads, maps, wood, fabric, broken mirrors, bullets, stones, breakaway glass from car accidents, and other found materials. Many of her pieces are titled after West African queens and deities that she says have been forgotten or ignored by Western historians. Sunami is credited with popularizing what she calls “psycheñwelic” art, a term she coined from the Greek word “psyche” (mind or soul) and the Swahili word “nywele” (hair). The style synthesizes abstraction and realism, pairing realistically rendered faces with more abstract depictions of hair or clothing as a way of representing the psychological and spiritual dimensions of her subjects. She has worked in this style since 2006, and it has influenced other Columbus-area artists. April Sunami Named 2026 Aminah Robinson Fellow PRESS RELEASE Columbus Museum of Art director Nannette Maciejunes has described Sunami in the Columbus Dispatch as an heir to the legacy of Aminah Robinson. Exhibition History Sunami’s work appears in the permanent collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, and the Southern Ohio Museum in Portsmouth. Her exhibitions include solo shows such as “Waiting for Transcendence” at the Southern Ohio Museum (2017) and “I Am Because You/We Are” at the McConnell Arts Center (2024). Internationally, her work was exhibited at the 13th Havana Biennial in Cuba (2019) and at the National Theatre in Columbus’s sister city of Accra, Ghana (2019). Most recently, her piece “The Street Where I Live” was shown at the Museos de la Plaza de la Catedral in Havana as part of the Bienal De La Habana (November 2024 through February 2025). Her murals are on permanent display throughout Columbus and Cincinnati, including “Looking to Tomorrow” in Walnut Hills and the “Beloved” mural in downtown Columbus, which was created in response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and pays tribute to Toni Morrison. Community Work Beyond her studio practice, Sunami works as a teaching artist with a range of populations, including young people discovering their voices, elders preserving wisdom, women navigating homelessness and addiction, and corporate leaders learning to see art as a form of self-care. She has served in leadership roles with several local arts organizations, including Creative Arts of Women, Mother Artists at Work, and Creative Women of Color (formerly Sistahs of the Arts). She was the first board president of All People Arts Incorporated and served as assistant director at the William H. Thomas Gallery. Sunami is married to writer and philosopher Christopher Sunami. She comes from an artistic family: her father-in-law John Sunami is an early pioneer of digital art with public installations throughout Columbus, and his father Soichi Sunami was a noted Pictorialist photographer known for his artistic collaboration with modern dance icon Martha Graham.