Marcia Kure Nigeria, b. 1970

Marcia Kure is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores postcolonial and diasporic identities.

Based in Nigeria and the United States, Kure employs diverse material strategies to engage with historical, actual, and potential systems of power and control. Careful consideration of source material is central to Kure’s practice which often incorporates a study of the Uli line, as well as natural, plant-based pigments.

Maria Kure’s work examines the act of drawing from technical, conceptual, and material perspectives. Her collages appropriate imagery from systems of knowledge production (ethnographic publications, auction catalogues, fashion magazines, and colonial photographic archives) to establish a framework for investigating line and drawing. Through cutting and tearing, Kure links fragmented ideas and images, and upends traditional foreground/background relationships. In Networks and Systems, she transforms lines, glyphs, pictographs, and scripts to map interconnected systems of labor, migration, trade, and capital. In her oil paintings, Kure captures the essence of her subject through swift gestures and elemental forms. In Script, Kure references quilting and patchwork as a corollary to the production of indigo and its historic relationship to market and labor, particularly to chattel slavery. These materials are treated with a deliberate intensity—wrung, marked, and scarred—treating the medium itself as a body. By considering the body as a communicative device, Kure's markings coopt script, text, and graffiti reminiscent of Vai (Liberia), Bamun (Cameroon), and Nsidibi and Uli script and body painting. Kure transforms these textiles to speak to the effect of power willed over objectivized bodies.