I propose an immersive project exploring the intricate facets of mobility, displacement, immigration, and assimilation, drawing from deeply intertwined personal, familial, and global histories. This interdisciplinary endeavor aims to craft a cohesive series of artworks merging painting, drawing, collage, and installation. These mediums will serve as a multifaceted canvas for storytelling, intertwining narratives of migration, belonging, and the human quest for identity. Themes will emerge from diverse historical and contemporary contexts, showcasing universal struggles and shared narratives across various African cultures migrating to southern Europe. Italy provides an exceptional opportunity to infuse my work with the city's rich historical and cultural tapestry. I intend to delve into Rome's archives, blending familiar and unfamiliar elements to construct narratives transcending geographical boundaries.

My artistic inquiries deeply involve the historic sociopolitical, cultural, and economic relationships between Western Europe, postcolonial Africa, and North America. I aim to delve deeper into critical and intertextual dialogues regarding adapting identity, African diaspora, power, history, and visual culture. I intend to conduct photographic investigations in Rome, focusing on the local market, architecture, and the people. These photographs will augment my ongoing archive, emphasizing the evolving narratives of identity and cultural intersections, then transform into paintings and installations. Additionally, I plan to introduce images from my extensive archive as a painter and photographer, reclaiming these creative expressions of African settlers as spaces of narrative plurality and possibility.

Kimmah Dennis (b. 1996, Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire) is a Liberian-Ivorian painter and photographer exploring traditional, experimental, and conceptual materials. Drawing on both existing and absent archives, her art reflects powerful narratives of governmental abuses, forced child recruitment, and the trauma of displacement— experiences rooted in her birth during the First Liberian Civil War. These histories have profoundly shaped her artistic practice, driving her to reject the confines of a single medium. Instead, Dennis employs a multidisciplinary approach, combining painting, drawing, collage, and installation to merge traditional and modern forms on a single canvas. She intuitively responds to each mark, creating works that navigate formal elements and narrative depth while exploring connections to place and space.

Dennis earned a BFA from Rutgers University and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was awarded the prestigious New Artist Society Full Scholarship Merit Award. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with a recent solo exhibition at the Trolley Barn Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY. She has also shown at notable institutions and galleries, including the American Academy in Rome, the New York Academy of Art, the John David Mooney Foundation, the University of Chicago, Color Club in Chicago, Shine Studio in Newark, Manufacturers Village in New Jersey, the Paul Robeson Gallery in New Jersey, and the Philly Art Collective in Philadelphia. Dennis is proud to have been awarded the 2024-25 Terra Foundation Affiliated Rome Prize Fellowship by the American Academy in Rome.

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Mixed media: oil paint, graphite, oil pastel, photo, fabric, foraged wall-paint chips, and found objects.