The Ellies
T. Eliott Mansa
2025 A Better World Award Winner
2022 Creator Award Winner
2019 Creator Award Winner
2025 A Better World Award Winner
2022 Creator Award Winner
2019 Creator Award Winner
T. Eliott Mansa is a Miami-based visual artist. Mansa has developed an assemblage practice that incorporates found materials from roadside memorials, applying ritual practices from West African, Caribbean, and Southern religious and vernacular sculptural traditions. He is interested in questioning the efficacy of political art making, and looks to apotropaic art-making practices, incorporating ritual practice to honor, memorialize, protect, and defend Black Lives from state and extra-judicial violence. Mansa attended the Yale School of Art, received a BFA from the University of Florida (2000), and an MFA from CUNY-Hunter College (2018).
Recent exhibition venues include the African American Museum of the Arts, DeLand FL; Coral Gables Museum, Coral Gables, FL; and Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora, Miami, FL. Mansa is a recipient of the 2019 and 2022 Ellies Creator Awards, Green Space Initiative Grant, and the YoungArts Microgrant. Mansa has attended residencies at Oolite Arts, Miami Beach, FL; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; the Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; and the Artists in Residence in Everglades, Miami, FL. His artwork is in the collections of the African American Museum of the Arts, DeLand, FL; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; and the Jorge M. Pérez Collection at El Espacio 23, Miami, FL.
2022
Room for the Living / Room for the Dead
For an exhibition that recreates the sunken living rooms popular in the 1970s as a shrine to the dead, and is activated as a gathering space to play cards and dominos, or bring flowers and photographs for their departed loved ones.
2019
For an exhibition that honors the African-American victims of state violence, using objects from grassroots roadside memorials, while referencing African sculptural art forms and the vernacular yard sculptures of the South.
2025 A Better World Award Winner
$25,000
2022 Creator Award Winner
$15,000
2019 Creator Award Winner
$7,000
2019 Creator Award Winner
$7,000

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