Portrait taken by Carlos Amay in 2021.
(See previous Studio portraits here)
Artist statement
I am an interdisciplinary Caribbean-American artist whose work tends to the evolving shape of grief through self-portraiture, material experimentation, storytelling, and family archive. Shaped by the loss of my mother in 2019, and informed by bell hooks’s framework of “re-membering,” my practice navigates the question: What does it mean to be whole when something vital is missing? Functioning both as a compass and mirror–creating tension in my work that dissects themes of: Identity, belonging, loss, memory, and girlhood.
Through self-portraiture and materiality, I survey this question, projecting my fears onto a recurring figure who inhabits psychological landscapes I cannot personally bear. Engaging with the framework of the body as an archive, this figure first emerged as a site of reclamation but has since evolved into a threshold where binaries: figurative and abstract, presence and absence, memory and transformation, folklore and reality can coexist.
In 2025 my paintings: “Martyr, 2024” and “Martyr’s Return (Duppy), 2025” develop this psychological space where the figure transforms from a sulking martyr into a wandering soul. In Jamaican folklore, a duppy is a soul not at rest. When creating these paintings, I asked what it means to never be absolved of your grief, which led me to paint my childhood memory with this chimeral spirit. This work encourages dialogue and research around mythologies of Afro-futurism, specifically through the lens of grief work, illuminating technologies of survival. Experimenting with burlap, mulberry paper, denim, converted family tapes, photography, and printmaking, I build a register of emotional, ancestral and material depth. Connecting personal and diasporic histories using material specificity to maintain ways of making and storytelling in my practice.
I am committed to developing methodologies of survival within this artistic framework. I’m not interested in offering solace or a solution in grieving, but another perspective on where we go when grief is not addressed, who we can be, and what it can transform into.
Biography
Kum spent her formative years between Albany, NY and Montego Bay, Jamaica. Attending primary school and experiencing a childhood in Jamaica that gave her the freedom to be curious as a child. Painting the veranda walls of her home and having time to roam her community of Tower Hill to find land crabs—one of her many hobbies as a child. These foundational years inform her colourful palette and nostalgia within her practice.
Kum earned an A.S. in Fine Arts from Hudson Valley Community College (2020), a B.A. in Studio Art from the University at Albany (2023) and a MFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in a range of group exhibitions, including the annual Mohawk Hudson Regional Show, a solo exhibition at the Spare Room Gallery in Baltimore and the Peale Museum of Art.
Kum spent her formative years between Albany, NY and Montego Bay, Jamaica. Attending primary school and experiencing a childhood in Jamaica that gave her the freedom to be curious as a child. Painting the veranda walls of her home and having time to roam her community of Tower Hill to find land crabs—one of her many hobbies as a child. These foundational years inform her colourful palette and nostalgia within her practice.
Kum earned an A.S. in Fine Arts from Hudson Valley Community College (2020), a B.A. in Studio Art from the University at Albany (2023) and a MFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in a range of group exhibitions, including the annual Mohawk Hudson Regional Show, a solo exhibition at the Spare Room Gallery in Baltimore and the Peale Museum of Art.