T Eliott Mansa

T Eliott Mansa has developed an assemblage practice that incorporates materials from roadside memorials, applying ritual practices from West African, Carribean, and Southern religious and vernacular sculptural traditions. Mansa was born in Miami, Florida and took a circuitous educational path through the Yale School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, to receive his MFA from CUNY-Hunter College in 2018, and his BFA from the University of Florida in 2000. He is interested in questioning the efficacy of political art making, and looks to apotropaic art making practices, and creates with a conceit of creating a ritual practice to honor, memorialize, protect, and defend Black Lives, from state and extra-judicial violence. Recent exhibition venues include LnS Gallery and David Castillo Gallery in Miami, FL; Rush Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; and Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, MD. His work is in the permanent collection of the African American Museum of the Arts in Deland, FL. Mansa lives and works in Miami, Fl. Mansa received the 2019 Creator Award from Oolite Arts.