The EMPOWERED Art Exhibit currently taking place at the Yonkers Riverfront Public Library, curated by Haifa Bint-Kadi, features artwork with the mission to give a voice to the disappeared, marginalized, and unseen. From their statement on the Riverfront website, the EMPOWERED exhibition “calls out the many instances of injustice and leads the way to a more just and empowering future—one where we find community and see each other reflected in our world.”
Haifa Bint-Kadi is a Palestinian Afro-Caribbean American artist, activist, and full-time curator of the City of Yonkers library system. She has also been an educator for the last twenty-three years and is currently an adjunct professor at SUNY Purchase, where she teaches arts for Social Justice, empowering her students to face history and disrupt systems built on oppression.
The daughter of refugees, Haifa maintains a studio practice grounded in family archives that are translated into paintings and mixed media’ apps tracing the Afro–Caribbean and Arab roots of her family’s diaspora. Haifa believes art is a form of decolonization and resistance against systemic racism as it heals, builds self-esteem, and evokes a sense of wonder and exploration in the world. This is evident in many of the pieces featured in the EMPOWERED exhibit; this is just a sampling of some of the beautiful art currently on display.
Carlos Mateau
Carlos Mateu, born in Havana in 1970, has resided in the United States since 1997. He calls his style of art “Pop Geometric,” and his paintings fuse graphic elements with realism. His subject matter incorporates symbolism, surrealism, and mysticism to reflect Afro Cuban life and religions, memories of Cuba, and life in the United States.
May Elian
“Disappeared” and “Still looking for you” by May Elian
May Elian is a Lebanese-Canadian artist based in New York. She uses typographical elements, including but not limited to Akkadian, Aramaic, English, French, and Morse Code as a means to induce interaction with anyone viewing the art. Themes May often explores include questions of identity and belonging and migration and asylum. Especially applicable for our current time, these sculptures represent all the forcibly disappeared and their loved ones who are still searching for them.
Moses Ros
Moses Ros is a Dominican American sculptor, painter, and printmaker. Influenced by Caribbean and NYC street cultures, urban pop culture, graphic abstract symbolism, and living memories, his art represents the contrasts, dualisms, and paradoxes present in the latino experiences of New York City.
AIKI
AIKI has been an artist since 1962. Their work comes from their lived experience as an undocumented Native womyn. Color, line, and light are often combined with images about shifting identity, perceptions, reality, and abstractions.
V Tineo
“100: An Expression of Human Experience” by V. Tineo
V. Tineo is an Afro–Latine BLM storyteller who began creating work about bodies at 19. An expression of human experience, their art explores the Dominican/American lens of both cultures’ beauty standards.
The artist will be giving away pieces from this piece of art on March 19, as part of the EMPOWERED artist talk taking place at the library from 6:30 – 7:30 PM.
Empowered is on display at the Yonkers Riverfront Art Gallery until March 28, 2025.
