BIOGRAPHY

Cara Marie Young is an artist from Atlanta, Georgia based in Detroit, Michigan. Her current interdisciplinary painting practice is an evolving response to the human experience, concerned with issues of race in the American landscape and the reality of life in her own skin. The artist seeks to engage with the community around her, recently exhibiting work at the Mbad African Bead Museum, Wayne State University, and The Feminist Art Museum in 2020. She was an exhibiting artist and speaker in the Race Forward Facing Race Conference in Fall 2016 at the Hilton Atlanta and a Dean’s Diversity Fellow at Wayne State University from 2019-21. The artist is currently completing her MFA at Wayne and seeking to engage with new opportunities abroad in the future.

https://cara-marieyoung.com

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am responding to life lived in a black body, that which has been historically consumed, observing the contemporary segregated landscape of America, and kindling the burning memory of its history. As a creative scholar and citizen of the United States, I am inspired to fabricate new visions of a future inclusive of Black people and Black history. I am driven to use a variety of media to expose “in/visible” realities of the present… unseen truths and lived experiences of minorities that history fails to document. I hope that the presence of my work as a living cultural artifact will shape viewers understanding of beauty, suffering, human connection, and history unseen. With a desire see and value what connects us all as human beings, the mediums of paint, paper, rope, clay and found materials merge to express the social displacement of skin color and the colored boundaries between our communities.

Knowing that the diaspora that Black Americans share will always connect us, I feel driven to use my platform to observe and combat the injustices of racism, promoting transnational healing and cross-cultural understanding. I am inspired to reveal and uplift Black beauty, Black joy, and Black liberation. Like many contemporary Black artmakers today, I strongly desire to deconstruct these images while reconstructing their power, ultimately combating their misrepresentation, and creating a place for an unseen beauty that has never had a home on American soil.