Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Title Forthcoming)

Americas Society and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum are pleased to present Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Title Forthcoming), the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. On view at The Aldrich from February 7 to June 14, 2027, and at Americas Society from April 14 to July 31, 2027, the show will bring together a comprehensive overview of her work to date and will include approximately forty paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and installations across two immersive institutional environments including the debut of new work. This exhibition is co-curated by Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart and Director and Chief Curator Aimé Iglesias Lukin.

Born and based in Saint-François, Guadeloupe, the practice of Kelly Sinnapah Mary (b. 1981) is inspired by her lineage, Indian and Caribbean folklore and literature, and a deep reverence for the natural world. Sinnapah Mary’s work draws from her surroundings in the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas department and her personal journey uncovering her family’s genealogy. Through her artistic research, Sinnapah Mary learned more about her ancestral past as a descendant of indentured workers brought from South India to the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century.

Through visionary world building, the artist explores her heritage and resuscitates Indian culture, and traditions absent from her upbringing using a cast of chimeric characters, predominantly female, that merge with nature to confront the enduring legacies of colonialism. Constructed as stories within a larger metanarrative, such as the Notebooks of No Return, Fables of Sanbras, and the Book of Violette, Sinnapah Mary’s protagonists are loosely based on herself and family members, conveying and embodying symbolic imagery adapted from the artist’s lived reality, the geography and geopolitical history of her birthplace, and inherited accounts.

This exhibition is composed as two new chapters of an ongoing visual tale that begins with drawing and expands outward to survey her paintings, sculptures and installations in a rich entanglement of inherited memory, imaginative narration, and historical testimony. Resisting cultural erasure and challenging colonialism’s systemic patriarchal racism, Sinnapah Mary’s mesmeric compositions cast shape-shifting heroines within lush island landscapes. Absent of anthropocentric hierarchies, these mythical realms foster abundant and evocative interspecies relationships grounded in themes of resistance, cultivation, and self-determination. Informed by the writings of celebrated Caribbean authors and critics Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and Suzanne Césaire, Sinnapah Mary invents a “new world,” a fusion of creation mythology, surrealism, and the political ideologies of anti-colonialism and ecofeminism to navigate private and collective storylines about trauma, displacement, hope, and hybrid diasporic space.

To accompany the exhibition, we will present a series of public programs and the artist’s first monograph, co-published by The Aldrich and Americas Society, featuring full-color plates, a joint essay by the curators, and a text by a guest contributor.

The exhibition will be on view at The Aldrich from February 7 to June 14, 2027, and at Americas Society from April 14 to July 31, 2027.

Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Title Forthcoming) is co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Americas Society. It is co-curated by Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart and Director and Chief Curator Aimé Iglesias Lukin.

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