2022 Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity
Krystle Lemonias is recognized for her influences from the intersecting concepts of class, commodification, gender, economic inequity, citizenship, and labor rights. She believes immigrant Black communities contribute richly to the United States’ cultural diversity and the workforce despite the barriers faced. Her works explore primarily women’s domestic labor contributions that play an integral role in the function of our society and contemplate the domestic socialization passed on through generations to do these jobs. Her work also explores personal and political intersections of power that govern how people interact daily through an immigrant lens, creating an entry point to consider the impact larger systems have on people from colonized nations.
Lemonias’ art is grounded in the principles of painting, sculpture, and drawing. Her practice establishes formal and intuitive processes that use interdisciplinary techniques to stitch together intersecting themes with personal narratives. She explores the social complexity regarding class, gender, citizenship, commodification, economic inequity, and labor rights. She uses found materials, patios, printmaking methods, and iconography to stitch together these themes with personal narratives. Each of her pieces reflects the complexity of being resilient through society’s exploitative structures then, using this understanding to get over and ahead for one’s self. What is the cost of resilience? Who really has the power?
Her works have been exhibited at Blum and Poe in the Show Me the Signs campaign for #sayhername and Make America What America Must Become at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. She has also shown at the New York Academy of Art in the AXA Art Prize Exhibition in 2020, and at the International Print Center of New York in the New Prints: Umbra in 2019.
Lemonias was born in Jamaica, in 1989, and became of age in New Jersey. She acquired a BFA in printmaking from New Jersey City University in 2018. She is currently a Master’s in Fine Arts candidate at the University of South Florida.