About the Exhibition:
Expanding on her previous body of work, Esiri Erheriene-Essi’s Homecoming explores home in the context of Black diasporic identities. Transforming vintage vernacular photography into large scale paintings, she reimagines scenes of daily life in explosive color and textured impasto. Paint becomes a form of speculative history, privileging neglected, untold, and forgotten narratives.
Across the many diasporic cultures and geographies reflected in her source material, home looks different. An American football team grins in a huddle; a Cameroonian father and his children drink on a ferry as they pass the Bay Bridge; a photo booth captures a family road tripping down the Scarborough coast.
Erheriene-Essi’s compositions capture the small moments that scaffold legacy— photographs, incomplete stories, and scraps of memory honor the legacies of Black ancestors that traveled far and wide, making homes and fostering community wherever they landed.
“Let us continue in our ancestors’ footsteps and legacies and invent, imagine, and create the power our freedom, liberation, and a new world requires.” – June Jordan
Homecoming welcomes Erheriene-Essi back for her second exhibition at Anthony Gallery, preceded by her participation in 2022’s group show, What It Could Be. The exhibition is on view at Anthony Gallery at 1360 W. Lake Street in West Loop from December 1st to January 6th, 2024.
