Krista Franklin is a poet and visual artist from Dayton, OH who lives and works in Chicago. Her poetry and mixed medium collages have been published in lifestyle and literary journals such as Coon Bidness, Copper Nickel, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam and Callaloo, and in the anthologies Encyclopedia Vol. II, F-K and Gathering Ground. Her visual art has been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Franklin is a Cave Canem Fellow, a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars, and a teaching artist for Young Chicago Authors, Neighborhood Writing Alliance, and numerous organizations in the city of Chicago. Krista is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in the Interdisciplinary Book + Paper Arts program at Columbia College Chicago. For more information, please visit her website, www.kristafranklin.com
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work straddles the literary and visual worlds. As a writer and mixed media artist, I create complex, interrogative images that reflect the vernacular experiences, dream worlds, and psychic landscapes of the black community in the United States and larger African Diaspora.
My art has a strong focus on subtext. I often utilize distinct, recognizable and familiar images of people of color, popular iconography, and the juxtaposition of text to engage the viewer and deconstruct the ways in which our gaze reifies and distorts notions of culture and gender, race and class, power and privilege.
I am deeply inspired by popular culture and public history, as well as by the frenetic glamour of music videos and magazines. Using a variety of mixed media — acrylic, watercolor, handmade paper and found objects: old letters, vintage magazine advertisements, playing cards, old photographs, and receipts — I work to create “post-modern” American totems wherein the complexities of our present and our past(s) are evoked through purposeful layering.
African Diaspora folklore and mythmaking are the conceptual concerns of my current visual explorations. Informed by the gothic fugitive slave narrative of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the shapeshifter, telepathic, and dystopic visions of Octavia E. Butler, and the elaborate collages of Romare Bearden, my recent work in papermaking, letterpress and bookmaking explore retro-Afro-Futuristic and Afro-Surrealist themes of the “fantastic” and the “speculative”.
