Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Olomidara Yaya) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer, performer and healer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. Her practice serves as a bridge, merging the intersections of art, activism, spirituality and healing as tools for retrieval. Her healing practice consists of being a catalyst for retrieval through the usage of reiki, sound healing, divination, channeling and mediumship. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the "Historical Present," as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective.
Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, SF MOMA, The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and Páramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Hinkle is also the recipient of several awards including The Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), The Jacob K Javits Fellowship for Graduate Study, The Fulbright Fellowship, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artists Award, the SF MOMA 2019 SECA Award and The Hellman Fellowship from UC Berkeley. She has artworks in the private collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, The San Jose Museum of Art, and SF MOMA. Her writing has appeared in Obsidian Journal, Artforum and Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics. She is the author of Kentifrications: Convergent Truths & Realities (2018) published by Sming Sming Books & Occidental College and SIR (2019) published by Litmus Press.
Kenyatta was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2019 – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.