August 2021

Su Su, Njaimeh Njie, Murjoni Merriweather

Images and Video courtesy of Alex Nuñez
Words by Nicole Martinez

Hailing from Baltimore and Pittsburgh, there are quite a few connections linking our August artists in residence Murjoni Merriweather, Njaimeh Njie, and SuSu. Get to know them before our Open House on Friday, August 27 from 6 to 9pm.

Murjoni Merriweather

As a young artist, Murjoni would visit museums and notice that the sculptures within their halls were overtly Eurocentric and not at all like her. Her sculptures reference and reframe that experience, taking the art historical bust that typically enshrined European nobility and molding a figure that celebrates Blackness in all of its forms. 

“I only saw pieces with Eurocentric features and I wanted to see something that was more familiar. I didn’t see people who looked like me,” she says, explaining how she began focusing more on features in her work, especially after finding clay. She began by sculpting pieces that resembled herself or her parents; now, her works are sometimes built from the likeness of a friend or family member, and other times crafted from her own imagination.

Murjoni first sketches her subject on paper before taking to the armature. She’ll sculpt by hand with wet clay from this sketch; once her bust is complete, she’ll split it in two to hollow it out for firing. 

Her first series in this body of work, ‘Grills’, painted her figure’s teeth in gold leaf and enshrined a style choice that’s typically misjudged by the mainstream media. 

“I feel like the media has a big toll on how [black people] feel about themselves, so I wanted to take one stereotype and make it into a bigger thing,” she says. “Grills have this societal idea around them, like there’s always a negative connotation toward Black people who wear them. But in reality, they’re just jewelry for our teeth. My sculptures discredit the idea of the ‘scary black man’ wearing grills pulling his mouth apart; I like to think he does it so you can see what’s on the inside rather than judging him from the outside. I also wanted the pose to be resemblant of how the Black community shows their pride, so I can look at this art and see that I am beautiful and represented in a positive way.”

In later series, Murjoni might add paint, glitter, jewelry and synthetic hair, always in pursuit of celebrating different aspects of Black culture - like grill culture and hair culture - to emphasize the way Black people celebrate themselves and their uniqueness. Ultimately, her work is a journey toward self love; one that she hopes will catch fire among her community. In Miami, she’s experimenting with these different elements as a way of continuing to show off her community’s beauty.

"Seeing Black features in art makes us feel like we're cared for. These pieces are meant to be mirrors or reflections we can see ourselves in, and I want them to be relatable."

Njaimeh Njie

Njaimeh’s documentary films and photographs take a look at being Black in America. Her tender portraits and interviews always aim to capture authenticity by getting to the root of her subject’s reality.

“I’m not invested in solely Black excellence or Black struggle, but instead, the range of perspectives in between that Black people experience,” she says. 

She developed her practice after spending several years teaching high school English, and taking a sabbatical to travel around Europe and West Africa, where her father was born. Upon returning to her native Pittsburgh, Njaimeh was eager to dive into some of the complexities she saw in her community and in everyday life.. 

“ I wanted to talk to Black women and girls and see what they were experiencing and feeling, because so often I think (the nuances of) our experiences get flattened.”

Njaimeh set out to tell the stories of Black women in her hometown, whether through portraits revealing an unspoken credence, or interviews that peer deep into her subject’s thoughts. From this initial project, Njaimeh branched out, including joining a colleague on a trip to France  to make portraits of Black Muslims in and around Paris. What she found, she says, was  a deeper understanding of anti-Blackness as a global phenomenon; that revelation also crystallized what her work had the potential to do.

“It’s about celebrating and loving Black people and providing documentation for us to see each other,” she says. “However we show up is ok.”

Though Njaimeh was not formally trained in journalism or documentary film, she’s taught herself through experimentation and credits her parents’ photographic careers as fundamental influences (Njaimeh says that she took a Nikon camera with her on a trip to Japan when she was sixteen, but didn’t pick another camera up until 2013). Nearly always shooting or editing in black and white, Njaimeh intersects portraiture with landscape photography, which she says “are very much about people, but free me up to explore.” Research is a foundational part of her practice as she likes to get a more holistic idea of a topic or place before laying her mark with her work. In Miami, she’s continuing work on a forthcoming publication, while wrapping up a public art project that’s ongoing in Pittsburgh and a short film.

Su Su

Trained to emulate the Classic painters and raised in a culture of mass consumption, Su Su weaves traditional painterly techniques with widely circulated pop culture iconography. Growing up in Beijing made her acutely aware of how Western culture is repackaged, diluted, and distributed within Eastern terrains; she thinks of her work as an opportunity to bridge gaps in their original meaning or intent. 

Her exploration in this realm began with Bambi, an image she had come to adore in her youth without ever realizing that the doe-eyed deer was actually a Disney heroine. In China, she said, most kids would sport Bambi clothes or accessories, but she was just a deer to them. 

“I found it very interesting that this story was reborn as a product, and that product has its own universe in another country on another side of the planet. That there is a story that has linked so many people by becoming a popular image and then a product, only to have that story get lost; it helped me see there was a gap,” she says.

Her paintings would often feature this character against a backdrop that related back to her own lived experience, and this series would form the backbone of her practice. Su Su often excavates iconography or popular images as fodder for her paintings, adding a flourish of reality that distinctly marks the painting as hers. Lately, Su Su is focused on memorializing the images and symbols of the Manchu culture (of which Su Su is a descendent), whose culture was nearly extinguished after Mao Tse-tung’s revolution took hold. 

“The Manchu culture wasn’t carried on or continuously developed because it was so exclusive - the public couldn’t access it and they didn’t have those things around because they were reserved for royalty,” she says. “With the last generation of this culture all but gone, it’s very difficult to keep its artistic legacy alive. It’s important to me to open accessibility and get people curious about this culture.”

Trained to paint in the style of Rembrandt and other Old Masters, her paintings often add a Surrealist flourish, and she has lately began making what she calls extrusion paintings. “Oil painting is one of the oldest art forms, and I was interested in presenting oil paint in a way it hasn’t been used before. It gives new life to an old medium,” she says. These works allow oil paint to drip through mesh, to create heavily textured surfaces. In Miami, she’s working on a series of paintings for an upcoming gallery show in New York.