Sometimes an artist needs to travel far from home to discover what makes them unique. For M. Florine Démosthène, BFA Fine Arts ’98, a move from New York City to Ghana in 2015 revealed what had been missing from her art practice.
The Weight of Rejection, Part 2 (38” x 50”), a collage on paper from Démosthène’s exhibition Master the Dream, presented at the SCAD Museum of Art.
“In Ghana, I was truly solo,” says Démosthène. “There was this sense of discovery.” At the time of her arrival, the country was experiencing an art renaissance. Démosthène was inspired by the artists there, who were less careerist and competitive than
those she knew in New York.
Démosthène’s show Master the Dream presented collages and sculptures representing women and groups of people. These works were inspired by her time in Ghana.
In Ghana, Démosthène began taking self-portraiture in radically new directions. “I was able to be more vulnerable in my art and explore personal themes like wounds or rejection in pictorial ways,” she says. She used herself as a model in figurative collages,
creating dramatic silhouettes from hand-painted polyester film. She also experimented with new materials and hired West African artisans to fabricate items to be incorporated into her work. “At Parsons, I learned the value of constant cross-pollination,”
she says. Broadening her perspective in a new location enabled Démosthène to find her voice.
A collage on wood panel titled The Dream Master 3 (24” x 36”), part of Master the Dream.
Démosthène returned to New York in 2019 and experienced new success. Her paintings, prints, and sculptures have been exhibited widely, and she was awarded a prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship.
For the next step in her art journey, Démosthène is spearheading the Oracle Project, an interactive interface aimed at preserving Indigenous African languages in diaspora and in danger of dying out. Démosthène will create a shrine-like sculptural
installation with a digital interface that visitors can use to submit questions. Creative technologists will program the interface to respond in an Indigenous language as a means of evoking the past and underscoring the need to preserve aspects of
African culture threatened by AI biases. The project will draw on Démosthène’s eclectic art-making practice and promises to take her into new creative terrain.
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