About // CV
Rebecca Marimutu is a photographer from New York City, based in Baltimore working to reimagine the practice of portraiture. She works to expand discussions around the photograph's materiality by concealing, obscuring, and protecting that which lies within the frame. Her artistic practice explores self, identity, and material tactility through photography, collage, paper sculpture, and audio-visual abstraction.
Her work has been shown at Waller Gallery, Catalyst Contemporary, Black Artists Research Space, and Eubie Blake Cultural Center in Baltimore, MD. In 2020, she received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Photographic and Electronic Media, with a concentration in Critical Studies.
She is currently an adjunct photography professor at MICA and Towson University.
Artist Statement
My work explores the image of myself for a landscape for abstraction and deconstruction - in a physical and conceptual sense. My work is centered around using nontraditional photography and portraiture to expand the confindes of the photographic image. I see abstraction as a means of protest, insofar as it breaks through ways we are often allowed to see ourselves in contemporary art.
As Black artists, particularly Black women artists we are often limited to or only awarded for work based in figuration. The forms through which we are allowed to view images of ourselves are often determined by voices, opinions, and structures that do not look like us. My intention is to use abstraction to both deconstruct and obscure the image of the self—the image and the confindes of the representational nature of the photograph.
Her work has been shown at Waller Gallery, Catalyst Contemporary, Black Artists Research Space, and Eubie Blake Cultural Center in Baltimore, MD. In 2020, she received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Photographic and Electronic Media, with a concentration in Critical Studies.
She is currently an adjunct photography professor at MICA and Towson University.
Artist Statement
My work explores the image of myself for a landscape for abstraction and deconstruction - in a physical and conceptual sense. My work is centered around using nontraditional photography and portraiture to expand the confindes of the photographic image. I see abstraction as a means of protest, insofar as it breaks through ways we are often allowed to see ourselves in contemporary art.
As Black artists, particularly Black women artists we are often limited to or only awarded for work based in figuration. The forms through which we are allowed to view images of ourselves are often determined by voices, opinions, and structures that do not look like us. My intention is to use abstraction to both deconstruct and obscure the image of the self—the image and the confindes of the representational nature of the photograph.