Sister Mine: Between Holding On and Letting Go

I am an outsider looking in

Ivna Esajas creates intuitive drawings on canvas that sit in the gray, fricative area between painting and drawing. Esajas experiments with presentation formats, processes, materials, and techniques in her new works.

She draws from experimental Black feminist and artistic traditions influenced by 20th-century artists like Faith Ringgold. Focusing on figures, still lifes, speculative narratives, and time machines that explore the everyday lives and worlds of Black people and Black imagination.

Esajas claims space using these works—both literally and figuratively—to show that the "fiction of Black identity," shaped by the legacies of colonialism and slavery, can be interrupted by the stories we tell about ourselves.