ABOUT

 

 

 

Cindy Bonaparte (b. 1985, California) is a Los Angeles based sculptor, visual artist, and educator, whose work is heavily informed by Eastern and Afro-indigenous-based healing philosophies. Her artistic practice includes sculpture, ceramics, collage, and installation depicting figurative and non-figurative forms. Her focus on the Black female body points to a return to an uncommodified relationship with the earth and currency. In 2021 under the mentorship of the artists and co-founders of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, her solo exhibition, Black Sanctity & Trust served as an altar and place of prayer for healing the Black body/the Black womb to the local Black Birth worker community in Los Angeles. Bonaparte describes her centerpiece digital collage in this show “The Salt Water Midwife” as the visualization of Mami Wata’s survival in her lineage that speaks to a wider cultural calling back to traditional healing ways. Her chosen media are of natural materials such as fabric, paper, and primarily clay. In particular, her current material of interest is in exploring a clay vein found while tending to earth on her neighborhood street. This raw clay has deepened her relationship with the land, locality, and art process. 

 

Bonaparte’s collage work layers different times and dimensions with symbolism, a mix of archival and present-day images, to create windows to reflect on the past, present, and imagine the future. Heritage, family, identity, and relationship with Afro-indigenous practices and spirits are themes that show up in her work. These threads of her heritage are expressed subtly or directly, and typically layered with the use of color, motif, and choice of medium. Her work poses an option for Black folk particularly to engage in embodied ancestral practices as remedy. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                    Photo Credit: Sonia Hernandez

 

She has participated in exhibitions with Sovern LA (2022); Los Angeles County Arts Department (2023); and Charlie James Gallery (2023). She was accepted into the SoLA Contemporary SEED program and slated to show new work in the culminating group show February of 2024. Bonaparte was awarded the 2023 California Arts Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship for emerging artists and will further bolster her work for exhibitions and residency with Sovern L.A. in 2024. In this residency she will further develop an art & healing curriculum based on indigenous cosmology, as well as co-curate programming and group exhibition.