NEW YORK, NY.- Essex Flowers is presenting Tracks & Bridges, a series of digital prints and drawings with mixed media on paper by Kabuya Pamela Bowens-Saffo.

Kabuya’s works in this series are homages to two major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, sculptor Augusta Savage and writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson. Commissioned by the New York World’s Fair of 1939, and destroyed at its conclusion, Savage’s sculpture The Harp was inspired by the lyrics of the poem Lift Every Voice and Sing, by writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson.

“Tracks and Bridges is an ongoing theme focus in my work . . . to recognize human relations, defining purpose and progress in current moments. The select works for exhibition are tracks and bridges reflecting a journey of hardships since 2020, 2021 and beginning possibilities of choice to build better bridges for 2022.”

~ KPBS

Kabuya Pamela Bowens-Saffo is a Florida-based artist specializing in printmaking and mixed media constructions. Her work explores aspects of everyday social and political human relations highlighting important references to acknowledge the history of African Americans. She is a BFA graduate of Howard University in Washington, DC and MFA studies at Tyler School of the Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia and Rome. Kabuya began her MFA studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York while working as a master printer with Robert Blackburn at the Printmaking Workshop.

Bowens-Saffo is the chief curator at the Anderson Brickler Gallery, a globally inclusive and community-centered art gallery focusing on art created by persons of the African diaspora. The gallery is located in Tallahassee, Florida, where Bowens-Saffo was an Associate Professor of Printmaking at Florida State University and Visiting Professor at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University.

Bowens-Saffo is a recipient of awards from New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts Mid-Atlantic Grant, Bronx Council for the Arts, and Artist Residencies at the Zora Neale Hurston Museum, Salem-2Salem in Baden-Württemberg, Germany and the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice Italy. She is founder of THINKING CAP: Collaborative Arts Projects involving artists, architects, engineers and environmental scientists.