Vamba Bility is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting/drawing, textiles, assemblage, audio-visual, text and performance. He earned his BFA from RISD and his MFA from Yale School of Art. He currently lives and works in New York and the New England area. His work has appeared in group exhibitions, including at the Africa Center, New York (2022); Lyles & King, New York (2021); and The Kitchen, New York (2017). He has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2024).
Courses
Wintersession 2024 Courses
SCULP 2175-101 - SCULPTING SPECULATIVE SPACE: AESTHETICS, SYMBOLISM, AND METAPHOR
LevelUndergraduate
UnitSculpture
Subject Sculpture
Period Wintersession 2024
Credits 3
FormatStudio
Mode In-Person
Start date
End date
SCULP 2175-101
SCULPTING SPECULATIVE SPACE: AESTHETICS, SYMBOLISM, AND METAPHOR
Sculpting Speculative Space serves as a gateway to our SciFi, technoscape where we question the West's future narrative in the age of Mars as the New Frontier. This course calls for creating and making practices such as assemblage, collage, and compilation in both analog and digital modalities. Here we begin to understand how intentional, speculative space will centralize convergences of race, gender, and sexuality with various technologies. Sculpting Speculative Space will deconstruct and reappropriate the aesthetics of popular speculative fiction as symbolism and metaphor for the West's subconscious. Some questions we will ask include: What are the implications and impact of themes and trends throughout SciFi and what do they reinforce in reality? How has the cyborg been theorized and visualized? How have marginalized bodies been visualized or rendered invisible in speculative fiction? How do we produce work that visualizes a future that centralizes marginalized bodies, experiences, and identities?
Elective
TEXT 2750-101 - MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIO: MATERIALS TO MEANING
The goal of this multidisciplinary and experimental studio course is to investigate the quotidian complexities of subject and object engagement through material exploration. This studio is for students from any major interested in further understanding their process. Weekly prompts of material examination and assigned readings will be provided to students, summoning deeper questions as to how and why the choices within their process are made, contending with and/or enacting within and beyond the tactile space. As a class, our time will focus on forms, methods, tensions and the unique properties of mediums, materials, and objects. We will work with painting, textiles, drawing, assemblage and invite any mixed media forms of art-making that students wish to work in. This course will harness students’ skills and develop an understanding and awareness to the connections between the materials and the poetic gestures within their process that are required to conjure meaning throughout their artistic journey.
