T. Eliott Mansa

2023
Visual
Miami, FL

T Eliott Mansa, born 1977, lives and works in Miami, Fl. Mansa received a BFA from the University of Florida (2000) and an MFA from CUNY-Hunter College (2018). Recent exhibition venues include African American Museum of the Arts in Deland, FL, Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora. Mansa has received the 2019 Creator Award from Oolite Arts, a Green Space Initiative Grant, a Young Arts Emergency Microgrant, and a Miami Independent Artist Stipend Grant. He has attended residencies at Oolite Arts in Miami Beach, and Artpace in San Antonio. His work is in the permanent collection of the African American Museum of the Arts in Deland, FL.

BIO

Mansa works to question the efficacy of political art making, by creating a ritual practice to honor, memorialize, protect, and defend Black Lives from state and extrajudicial violence. Mansa’s assemblage, paintings, and sculptures incorporate commercial materials in a way that subverts their original intent, reimagining them as apotropaic objects. His work incorporates the aesthetic of amalgamation found in grassroots roadside memorials, visionary Southern vernacular sculpture, and the West African practices of nkisi nkondi and bocio sculpture making. Mansa’s intention is to trigger the radical imagination of viewers, encouraging them to subvert the status quo and find socio-political agency in their own communities.

STATEMENT

How can we make the outdoors a space of belonging?

I believe a key part of utilizing my artwork to explore and communicate ideas around equity within the environmental movement is to bring more attention to the history of the Black Maroons of Florida, the Seminole Maroons, and Seminole Freedmen coming to the Florida swamps to free from slavery. These Africans joined with the Seminoles in the seventeenth century and fought together in three Seminole Wars.