BIO
Erin Kendrick is an international artist and arts educator from Jacksonville, Florida. Her color-rich, acrylic ink-stained works of art and transformative installations seek to inspire a dialogue about contemporary spectatorship and the power of language as it relates to perceptions of and about black women. She has exhibited work in museums, galleries and alternative spaces throughout the United States and abroad. After receiving her formal art training at Florida State University (BFA, Studio Art, 1999) and Georgia State University (MFA, Drawing & Painting, 2003), she worked for many years as a Studio Artist and Arts Educator in Atlanta, Georgia. Although, she stepped away from the arts for 8 years to run an event design business (E. Street Design Co.), she returned to exhibiting artwork in 2016 with a renewed drive for art making and a new body of work.
She is currently the Director of Education and Lead Visual Art Instructor at Jacksonville Arts & Music School. Having taught at every level including higher ed, she was recently named the Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville’s 2019 Art Educator of the Year. In 2018, she was voted Best Visual Artist, Best Art Exhibition, and Best Arts Educator in Folio Weekly’s Best of Jax 2018 poll. She has won several grants including the Jackie Cornelius Art Residency Grant (Douglas Anderson School of the Arts), the Lift Every Student Artist-In-Residence Grant, and the Community First Foundation Art Ventures Individual Artist Grant. Erin maintains a studio at CoRK Arts District. Her current initiative, “Artists Types”, helps practicing artists with career advancement by providing workshops, mini-courses, and templates for CV writing, artist statements, proposals, and more. As an educator she lives by Elbert Hubbard’s quote, “Art is not a thing. It is a way.”
ARTIST STATEMENT
My color-rich portraits and transformative installations explore how language has been used as a rubric for the formation of identity in the lives of black women and girls. The relationship between spectator and spectacle (of which, black women and girls have historically been the latter), exposes how language has informed behavior and is often a gauge for deciding who deserves safety and protection. Conversely, adapting language, whether verbal or non-verbal, into a codified dialect has provided a means to define cultural idiosyncrasies that identify safe spaces, offer inclusion, and provide refuge; allowing us to align, pivot, and thrive. Employing installation as a form of art-making allows me to activate the environments that we occupy daily while establishing context for the paintings. It makes the viewer an integral part of the work and in doing so asks them to reflect on their role as spectator/spectacle as well. It stagnates the disconnect between viewer and artwork, binding together the work of art, the viewer, and the space they occupy.
By centering the language and lived experiences of black women and girls, I present them as ways to examine space, selfhood, and safety in our terms. The painted and ink-stained characters serve as spectacles, spectators, and witnesses. They stare back at the viewer and one another challenging inherited perceptions and historical prejudice through the transformative power of looking/seeing, the oppositional gaze.
CURRICULUM VITAE
EDUCATION
2003
MFA, Drawing & Painting, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA
1999
BFA, Studio Art, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2022
SHELTER-IN-PLACE, The Corner Gallery at The Jessie, Jacksonville, FL
2021
The Things We Bring, Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts, Valdosta, GA
Pikin, South Gallery at Florida State College at Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL
2020
Echo, Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church, Jacksonville, FL
2019
The Wiz, Players-by-the-Sea, Jacksonville, FL
Oh Snap!, Riverside Fine Arts Association, Jacksonville, FL
2018
Photobooth, Heather Moore Community Gallery, Cathedral Arts Project, Jacksonville, FL
her own things - an exhibition by erin kendrick, Yellow House, Jacksonville, FL
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2022
The Color of Law - The Impact of Redlining in Communities of Color, Historic Eastside Cultural Center, Jacksonville, FL
Screams Echo: The Legacy of Lynching, Yellow House, Jacksonville, FL
Black Creativity 2022, Museum of Science & Industry, Chicago, IL
2021
The Artists Answered the Call, Ritz Theater & Museum, Jacksonville, FL
Mirror in the Dark, Visionary Art Collective (digital exhibition), Juana Williams, Curator
Variance, I Like Your Work Podcast (digital exhibition), Jamaal Barber, Curator (catalog)
The Fact of Blackness, Dominique Gallery via Artsy.com (digital exhibition), Curator, Jasmine McNeal
30th Anniversary of Art Ventures Exhibition, Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL
2020
The Nameless Now, Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, St. Augustine, FL
ArtWork(ers) United, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL
Paint: Medium as Power, Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY
W.A.V.E.- Women Artists. Visual Experiences, Jacksonville International Airport, Jacksonville, FL
As a Matter of Black, Miami Urban Contemporary Experience (MUCE), Miami, FL
2019
Through Our Eyes: Struggle and Resistance - Journey to South Africa, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Through Our Eyes 2019: The Revolution will be Documented by the Artists, Ritz Museum & Theater, Jacksonville, FL
Welcome to the Afrofuture: Ground Zero, New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans, LA
Musing Women, FSCJ South Gallery, Wilson Center for the Arts, Jacksonville, FL
Enroute, Bethune Cookman College Performing Arts Center, Daytona, FL
Contemporary Portrait: A National Juried Exhibition, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock, TX
2018
SUFFRAGE, Yellow House, Jacksonville, FL
Stories/Allegories, Jacksonville International Airport, Jacksonville, FL
Through Our Eyes 2018: Struggle & Resistance, Ritz Theater and Museum, Jacksonville, FL
First Coast Artists on the First Amendment, Karpeles Manuscript Museum, Jacksonville, FL
2017
Kesha - A Black Female Experience of Identity and Race, Jax Makerspace, Jacksonville Public Library, Jacksonville, FL
2016
Through Our Eyes 2016: Sensory Perception, Ritz Theatre and Museum, Jacksonville, FL
PIKIN. ARTIST STATEMENT
In spite of the relentless adultification of young black girls, they are children first. To experience adolescence authentically without the intrusion of racial bias and spiritual, emotional, and physical violence is their absolute right. However, the idea that black girls are small black women is highlighted in various capacities in the US - disproportionate discipline rates for black girls in schools for subjective infractions, expectations of keeping family secrets in spite of sexual, emotional, and physical trauma, resistance to non-traditional gender identities, a lack of empathy in cases of black missing and endangered girls, incessant, unwarranted police violence, as well as the age-old myth of the black superwoman.
Solutions to these disparities have been proffered in the form of fortified assimilation, complacent longsuffering, and apathetic disregard, but the emergence of what has been termed, Black Girl Magic, has presented itself as an effective solution. The term highlights a renaissance of black women and girls, reclaiming agency, and stepping from the margins to the center in the last 10 years. By centering the authentic lived experiences and the voices of black women and girls—as both salve and resolve to these disparities—we grant our black girls a fighting chance.
On Pikin.
This exhibition was inspired in part by the memoir “Taking Flight” by ballerina, Michaela DePrince,
as part of the 2020-21 FSCJ Author Series.
Michaela DePrince's origin story is one of loss, disposal, and redemption, and personal absolution. Each the residue of the power of choice. Born Mabinty Bangura in Sierra Leone, as a child Michaela DePrince endured the tragic loss of her parents and abandonment by an uncle who considered her too ugly and too smart for his time. Often referred to as “pikin” meaning child, she was sold to an orphanage whose caretakers substituted punishment and shame for love. With the hope of being adopted into an American family, she persevered and found strength in standing up for her orphanage bestowed best friend, Mabinty Suma. Each considered outcasts among the children, young Michaela's imagination and fortitude would win them both friends and eventually legal sisterhood by adoption. DePrince survived all of this before the age of five. Her story, like so many black girls, is one of resilience, and she has tendered her lived history as a beacon for girls like her.
“Pikin” is for the Mabintys of the world. Fire-breathing dragons. Standing up for one another time and time again