Kelly Sinnapah Mary

James Cohan is pleased to present The Book of Violette, an exhibition of new work by Kelly Sinnapah Mary, on view at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location from February 14 through March 22, 2025. This is Sinnapah Mary’s first solo exhibition with James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Friday, February 14 from 6-8 PM, and a conversation between Sinnapah Mary and writer and curator Andil Gosine on Thursday, February 20 at 6 PM. 

Kelly Sinnapah Mary creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that draw upon the complex interrelationships between folklore, literature, inheritance, history, and the natural world. The Book of Violette represents the latest chapter of an ongoing visual notebook in which the artist explores a rich repository of memories, mythologies, and superstitions. A deep enmeshing of figure and landscape is central to Sinnapah Mary’s practice, and reflects both her resistance to the racialized anthropocentrism at the heart of the imperialist enterprise and the artist’s connection to her ancestors. Drawing upon the work of Caribbean intellectuals such as Suzanne Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Édouard Glissant, Sinnapah Mary interweaves the physical environment that surrounds her home and studio in Guadeloupe with fantasy, science fiction, and archetype to speak to contested histories and the lived experience of diaspora. In the artist’s hands, surrealism becomes both a strategy of imaginative thinking and a way of evolving the semi-autobiographical figures that populate her paintings and sculptures.

The Book of Violette takes its title from the female protagonist who appears throughout the paintings in the exhibition in various guises and is named for the artist’s grandmother. Like Sinappah Mary’s schoolgirl avatar Sanbras, Violette shapeshifts from composition to composition, at times an older woman, a girl, a young boy, or an animal. In some paintings, she is a delicately veiled first communicant, in others, a resplendent, reclining odalisque, her Black skin tattooed with verdant plant life that curls like vines alongside symbols and stories from fables, religious texts, and the artist’s own daily life. Like her grandmother Violette, the artist lives close to the land, tending to her garden a part of the daily ritual of her studio practice. In her paintings and objects, Sinnapah Mary posits deep and reciprocal kinship connections between the human, animal, and botanical that express an understanding of the ways in which landscape can hold memory, tethering us to those who came before us and will come after.