Weaving Textile And Sculpture, Anya Paintsil Reveals Complex Narratives Through The Exploration Of Human Hair

Eyes wide open and directly comforting the viewer, mouth agape, the figure cloaked in dark hair embellished with colorful plastic hair picks conveys shock, even horror. The pale pink background tames the frenzy and draws us back to her exaggerated Afrocentric nose and the brighter pink hair clips that pop out from the quintessential 1980s color palette.

Rhitta Gawr (2022) by Anya Paintsil references the Welsh giant who killed kings and wore their beards as a trophy before he was slayed by Arthur, who commanded his men to place stones over the giant’s body and form a burial mound known as Gwyddfa Rhita.

Paintsil’s elaborate compositions marry textile and sculpture to create captivating portraits that evoke a painterly quality through the use of recurring facial features, human hair, and an array of hair accessories. She engages in practices such rug-hooking, embroidery and tapestry-making, some of which she learned from family members.

At once visceral and intriguing, we can’t look away from these works and their intertwined complex, nuanced stories navigating the female gaze, personal relationships, and collective prejudice. Her work is informed by growing up as a person of color in a mixed-race family in North Wales and working as a hairdresser.

A robust crowd poured into Hannah Traore Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side (LES) for Thursday night’s opening of Proof of their victories, a solo exhibition showcasing the Welsh and Ghanaian artist. The LES has quickly evolved into a bustling art community, with galleries on nearly every block and Traore’s a standout for its use of elegant space and lighting. The neighborhood retains a singular mix of grit and glam that first emerged in the late 1970s with the Loisaida (a term derived from the Nuyorican pronunciation of Lower East Side) graffiti and street art scene. Traore strives to amplify artists who were historically marginalized from the mainstream marketplace. It’s fitting she chose the LES. Futura, Rammelzee, CRASH, DAZE, Dondi, Lee Quinones, Lady Pink, A-One, and other artists working on the LES alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring between roughly 1979 and 1985 are now recognized for their seminal contributions in an art scene that forever transformed the landscape of downtown Manhattan and the global art world. New York is ripe for another seismic shift fueled by creative vigor and counterculture.

Paintsil’s pioneering work eschews the ornamental representation of human hair and elevates it as the central element of each artwork. Hair is not decorative in Ghana, and it is imbued with cultural significance and its intrinsic links to socioeconomic status and identity.

Borrowing the Welsh word for hair, Gwallt (2022) is absent of any facial features and indulges in the hair itself dotted with small, disposable hair ties, the kind that quickly lose their elasticity and painfully trap strands.

Several works are inspired by traditional women’s dresses and hairstyles from Paintsil’s grandfather’s ethnic group, the Fante (also spelled Fanti) people of the southern coast of Ghana between Accra and Sekondi-Takoradi. They speak a dialect of Akan, a language of the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo language family.

“My work is informed by materials, and the concept of my work can’t be detached from the materials,” Paintsil said. “The medium and the message are quite literally braided together.”

Proof of their victories is on view through February 4, and runs concurrently with Old Indian Tricks, a solo exhibition of artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, which opened October 27 and is on view through January 14.

Old Indian Tricks presents a thirty-foot installation of 48 monotype prints that reveal the interplay of viscosity from Heap of Birds’ oil and the printer’s ink. It’s a painstaking and exhaustive process to create 24 primary mono prints and 24 ghost prints on paper. Each 22-inch-by-30-inch sheet requires a plexiglass plate the same size, and Heap of Birds must write all text backwards with clear liquid on newsprint of the same size, using some 2,000 Q-tips each day to adjust the writing.

The time and technique underscores Heap of Birds’ commitment to advocating for indigenous communities while celebrating the individuality of each person within a tribal circle.