Ijeoma D. Iheanacho - The Cloth Series: Seattle 2001, Plan

Ijeoma D. Iheanacho

Ijeoma D. Iheanacho was born in Fort Worth, Texas. As a child she lived in distinctly unique spots in the South like Tucson, Arizona and Charlotte, North Carolina. She left the South to attend Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. While majoring in Architecture, she took photography courses and independent studies with a focus on using the frame work of architecture to influence her artistic practice. Upon completing her degree, she relocated to New York City and began parallel careers as an architect and visual artist. Her early childhood in the South contrasted her adult development in New York and gave her a heightened awareness of the formulation of identity. In her work as a visual artist she explores the creation, manipulation, and reconstruction of personal identity with a focus on how cultural, political, and personal circumstances influence the creation of both personal and social identity with a focus on the marginalized people of society. She uses her training as an architect to create photographic installations that are designed to arrest the body while the eye is focused on the photography, thus intensifying the viewing experience. She has been exhibited throughout New York City in spaces like Art for Change Gallery, Local Project, the Bronx River Arts Center, Bronx Art Space, and La Vuelta. She has received recognition nationally, showing in the Elmwood Playhouse in Nyack, NY and the New Visions Gallery in Salt Lake City, UT. Her images have been used in the independent film Afropunk, as well as in a four part photo series for the Afropunk.com website. Her early series, Cloth, has been accepted into the Photographs and Prints Collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her most recent body of work, Faces of the Great Recession, focuses on the people behind the statistics of our current economic turmoil, recently debuted in the Faces of the Economy exhibition at Art For Change Gallery. She is currently producing her largest installation to date, the reImagining. This work will be the culmination of her more focused work with identity and the Black female image. She is creating a 300 image installation that will allow 100 Black women to re-represent themselves based on their journey to reclaim and reaffirm their personal identities. The reImagining was awarded fiscal sponsorship by the New York Foundation for the Arts. Ijeoma is currently living and working in New York, New York.