CORNER STORE COLUMN

Creating Words When There are None

with Fellowship Director Kara Mshinda

by M. R. WOOD

“I believe in the power of art to really transform people. Not just their lives, but also their perspective on the world. I feel like art builds empathy. And I guess, at the end of the day, that's what I would like my work to represent… Can you feel something when you look at this?”

Earlier this year, Kara Mshinda—the Fellowship Director at DVAA as well as a visual artist and educator with a background in photography and visual anthropology—very generously leant her time to discuss her work and her process with me. Now, I’m so excited to share the interview in celebration of her work with the DVAA Fellows of 2024, and to ring in the new Fellows for 2025.

We’re also publishing this piece in November of 2024, a few weeks after the presidential election—and, given that context, I can’t help but see in Kara’s work and in her words the themes that have been roiling underneath everything lately. Where do we put our most difficult feelings? When words fall short or miss the mark, how can we hope to translate our inner lives enough to connect with one another? For me, Kara’s work inspires the hope that art might be capable of that wordless transmission. To return to her statement above: “Can you feel something when you look at this?”

“Abstraction is my first love,” Kara says, “There's something about the emotions that come with looking at a work that's abstract.” “Angry Organ” and “Caravan”—two of Kara’s pieces in the DVAA flat file—are emblematic of the ways that abstraction can create its own semiology; sign systems sourced from and for the emotions they mean to express. Both pieces were created in 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, and both were borne from grief.From a series of black and white drawings entitled The Departed Series, “Angry Organ” and “Caravan” are each the product of a practice Mshinda has been fostering for over a decade. “I think most people aren't familiar with my abstract drawings. Most people, when they think of me, are like, ‘Oh, she's a collage artist and a photographer,’” Kara says, nodding to her current practice. (If you are not yet familiar, you'll want to be.) “But my abstract drawings are actually my most personal forms of artwork, because they're just purely from my own imagination.”

“Abstraction is my first love. There's something about the emotions that come with looking at a work that's abstract.”

Kara describes the evolution of her practice: “I would do drawings while my daughter was still very young because that's what I could manage time-wise.” Over the years, she came to a technique in which she would draw one or two fluid lines, then create images within them. “I was really kind of fascinated by… how it could emerge from what I perceive as these random lines.” It feels like this emergent process is part of what makes Kara’s work so kinetic. Each element was drawn in conversation with the moment in which it was drawn, and so the still image is instead a compendium of moments, made lively by its temporal depth.

As for how Kara conveys these moments, her visual style was very much informed by her thesis work in graduate school. “I studied a group of graffiti artists and I learned that they have a whole alphabet. One that we're familiar with—the ABC’s—however, there's a certain style of lettering. And you'll see a change from region to region. New York has a style, Philly has a style.” Here, too, abstraction allows language to express more, to become more personal: “My abstract drawings are taken directly from what I learned from graffiti artists. And doing this kind of—it's called hand style. It’s a writer's own particular kind of way of writing letters.”

Grief and the pandemic lockdown—a time when solitude made day-to-day life almost exclusively personal—brought Kara again to her most personal medium. “These both are works in a series related to death and people whom I lost.”

“My abstract drawings are my most personal forms of artwork, because they're purely from my own imagination.”

Kara points first to “Angry Organ”—the angry eyes and movement throughout the piece, each element practically vibrating off of its central fluid line. “My father died from pancreatic cancer, and so this is my interpretation of what the disease could have looked like in his body.”

“Caravan,” too, is founded in grief. “There was a professor who I knew—I didn't know her very well, but she was one of those professors who was pretty well known in her field. She's an anthropologist, a Black woman anthropologist. Her name was Leif Mullings.” Kara had had the opportunity to meet Mullings when she worked as an ethnographer on a public health study here in Philadelphia. “The research team and I were using an ethnography that she did in Harlem, and so we went to visit her in New York. And it was just wonderful to meet her actually in person. And she died that year as well, in 2020.”

“‘Caravan’ is meant to be a piece that reflects the passing of knowledge.” Kara embedded this continuity beyond loss in the continuous line at the heart of each piece: “The overall meaning of the work is, for me, about connection. Even though those two came out of grief, it was me kind of saying, ‘I still wanted to remain connected to the individuals who died.’”

I ask Kara if making the work in this series was helpful in processing her grief, and she replies, “Oh my goodness, yes. I emphatically say yes.” Though her media and subjects change, Kara continues to incorporate that healing into her practice each day. “I have to do something artful every day,” Kara says. “It could be just looking at artwork, it could be creating something, it could be photo editing, something that involves me being in communion with the creative in some way.”

“My abstract drawings are taken directly from what I learned from graffiti artists. And doing this kind of—it's called hand style. It’s a writer's own particular kind of way of writing letters.”

In her current work, Kara blends the abstract into the photorealistic by taking instant film photographs of collages. There’s something so startling about a photograph—a medium commonly associated with reality—capturing impossibly abstract explosions of color and shape. The resulting images almost seem like they’re documenting magic; asking the viewer to consider a reality where such vibrance is possible.

As for what’s next, Kara is curious about leaning more into abstraction in the future. “I kind of ventured away from showing more abstract work. And I want to get back to it... I've been told as an artist—and I think other abstract artists, too—that abstraction is not accessible to audiences, or at least mainstream audiences.” We agree that this reasoning feels a little funny. When it comes to interpreting a work of art, what is more accessible than form, color or texture—things we can perceive before we even learn what the forms, colors or textures are? Have we grown so accustomed to interpreting symbols and codes that we’ve forgotten how to feel the tones and shapes they’re made of?

Perhaps this is the work ahead of us: dismantling the sign systems we’ve been given, and repurposing the pieces into a language of our own making—one that is emotional; is personal even as it is connective; a language that heals us as we use it.

“The overall meaning of the work is, for me, about connection. Even though those two came out of grief, it was me kind of saying, ‘I still wanted to remain connected to the individuals who died.’”

Kara Mshinda (she/her) is a visual anthropologist who creates photo-based artworks about identity, memory, and embodiment in community contexts. Mshinda is an alumna of Temple University (‘07) and is best known for using collage, abstract drawing, collaborative portraiture, and alternative photo processes to document urban landscapes, candid play, social encounters, and the material culture of daily life. Her recent projects include Meta, a collection of abstract ink drawings on photos, canvas, and paper and All Hands Hold, an instant film photography project and visual study about identity expression and hand performance. Mshinda is Fellowship Director at Da Vinci Art Alliance and is a Principal Collaborator of GrioXArts, a studio-centered art space at Cherry Street Pier that focuses on building community via process-based art education.

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Miden Wood is a writer and visual artist with a background in children’s television and sketch comedy. In her professional practice, Miden is invigorated by finding and elevating the why at the heart of our shared experiences—be that a gallery exhibition, a live show or a community conversation. She is grateful for the opportunity to work with and for the purpose-driven artists at DVAA, and, through that work, to serve the larger community.