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Kelley-Ann Lindo (Virginia Commonwealth University) is a recipient of the 2021 Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.

Kelley-Ann Lindo is an artist who grew up in Jamaica, and her practice explores ideas around trauma and memory, and their relationship to identity in the Caribbean. She examines interruptions, recollections, imaginary representations of truth, and false memory in postcolonial spaces — in sculpture, installations, print media, and audio “fieldscapes” that explore themes of precarity, ephemerality, collective memory, and vulnerability. Lindo employs the archive to investigate individual and shared memories, and to explore histories, testimonies, and identities. Archives are important to her, and oral histories play a significant role in preserving one’s cultural identity and understanding the past. Memories, Lindo says, are the alchemy of emotion and observation. When we retell a story in repetitive fragments, that story becomes an essential tool for advocating for one’s presence and using those kinds of materials as a way of self-actualization for healing.

Lindo grew up in the Caribbean and her stories of loss, family separation, water-related trauma, and grief allow her to speak from a place of belonging, both in the past and the future.

For her, water exposes the truth of how black, displaced bodies are consistently positioned and disenfranchised. Her work questions social hierarchy in postcolonial spaces, working-class cultures, sadness, and the use of storytelling as a tool to elevate those who have been deemed invisible/un-visible as a result of inherited colonial social structures.