MAHARI CHABWERA
Mahari Chabwera is an artist, curator and writer born in 1995 in Washington DC. After graduating with a BFA in painting and printmaking from VCU in 2017, she began making tapestry paintings that embody a womanist well-being, rooted in self-reflection and self-determination. Post graduation she’s exhibited work in the Amuse Gallery at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Eleanor & Hopps Gallery at The CAN, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach, 1708 Gallery and Iridian Gallery. She was the 2019 - 2020 recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship, and the 2020 recipient of the Visual Arts Center Emerging Artist Award. She’s curated shared projects like In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, We Made Armor in 2019 and Primordial Emanations, that which is brought forth follows the womb: a surrender to her luminous blackness in 2020, as embodiments of Black space for Black people to share and receive recognition for our cultural and intellectual contributions. She thinks about her work as ancestor reverence, myth-making and as a means of remembering and exploring her predecessors' wisdom traditions. The beading and glass mosaic techniques she uses are slow-moving methods that make a meditation out of her process. She uses her tapestries to create self-soothing salves, sourcing direction and sustenance from writers like Tananarive Due, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler & Ntozake Shange. Guided by them, Mahari works towards a life of liberatory, magic medicine making. This is modeled in her current pursuit : a series of seven large, scale tapestry paintings that give form to seven attributes of spiritual energy.
MAHARI’S LIST
BOOKS
Books / Essays
Poetry is not a Luxury, Audre Lorde
The Living Blood, Tananarive Due
Sassafras, Cyprus, Indigo, Ntozake Shange
The Hand I Fan With, Tiny McElroy
Wild Seed, Octavia Butler
Possessing The Secret of Joy, Alice Walker
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Alice Walker
Women Who Run with The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Albums / Songs
Mama’s Gun, Erykah Badu
Ibeyi, Ibeyi
The Complete Okeh Sessions 1952 - 1955, Big Maybelle
Reverend Lee, Roberta Flack
Sowa, Fatoumata Diawara
