Born in Chicago, IL, 1959
Lives and works in New Orleans, LA
kai lumumba barrow is a visual and performance artist who has exhibited paintings, sculptures, site-specific installations and multimedia performances in Atlanta, Brooklyn, Chicago, Durham, Glasgow, London, New Orleans, and NYC. barrow is concerned with notions of radical imagination. Her sprawling paintings, installations, and sculptures transgress biological, geographic, ideological, and physical borders. Her work is imbued with cultural and historical clues that reference avant-garde art and radical liberation movements. barrow’s installations and ritualistic environments recall African diasporic cosmologies incorporating reusable materials such as dirt, moss, rocks, machines, money and bones as a visual and ethnographic language. Together with her four muses: Absurdity, Sarcasm, Myth, and Merriment, the work performs queer, Black, feminist resistance to carceral control.