Kuumba Artist Feature: Apanaki Temitayo M
Harbourfront Centre’s Kuumba festival is spotlighting a different Black artist each day of February. Today we’re sharing the story of Apanaki Temitayo M.
Mental health is a core theme in Apanaki Temitayo M’s work. She is CAMH’s first Artist-in-Wellness, where she also teaches workshops about mental health and drug addiction, merging the worlds of culture and health. Underlying her work is the conviction that art is a powerful form of therapy, and she uses her practice to try to educate communities about this concept. The preoccupation with mental health is not just academic or theoretical for Apanaki. She has lived experiences with mental health, being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and PTSD. She has felt, first hand, the benefits of art-as-therapy and how it can be used as an expressive outlet to digest trauma. She adds, “I believe my true calling is to bring a truer understanding about artists with lived experience with mental health, at the intersection of Blackness, to help destigmatize what that means.”
Apanaki’s art is heavily influenced by her Caribbean and African heritage, which she expresses through the textures and materials of her pieces. Her collages often feature abstracted depictions of Black women, sometimes close-up portraits, other times celebrating their whole bodies. Earthy tones contrast against vibrant pops of colour that, along with bold patterns, reference African fabrics. Honouring her spirituality, she homages the Orishas (Yoruba Gods), whose presence is uplifted by accompanying hints of Afrofuturism. Apanaki accentuates her collages with novel materials, such as beads, shells, crystals, and sequins, imparting them with sensuality, vulnerability and the divine. Her works brim with vulnerability, uplifting femininity, at times full of smoothness and harmony, and other times more aggressive, with bold, clashing colours that challenge audience members to understand her experiences.
As part of Kuumba, Apanaki’s new exhibition Femme de Fleur is being exhibited at Harbourfront Centre, where, installed in our Craft & Design windows, it will be publicly visible from February 20 onwards. Apanaki is excited about the exhibition. Harbourfront Centre has been a supportive figure in her arts career since the very beginning, when, as an artist-activist, she gave one of her first performances for us in the early 90s. As a spoken word poet, she performed under her name, Indigo, collaborating with artist collectives that, like her, had a keen sense of social justice. It was collaborations like these that helped her join her voice with other artists to protest the beating of Rodney King. While Los Angeles was reeling from riots, they, along with hundreds of others, took to Yonge Street to show solidarity with his plight, simultaneously protesting local police brutality.
Given her longstanding relationship with Harbourfront Centre, being shown in Kuumba seems almost like a capstone. She adds, “It has been a dream of mine to be featured as part of Kuumba. This is literally a realization of a dream.” Going beyond her personal relationship with Harbourfront Centre, Apanaki also notes that Black Futures Months celebrations like Kuumba are an opportunity for her to check out artists, new or familiar, and reconnect her family with the wider Afro-Caribbean diaspora.
Apanaki Temitayo M is a bisexual author, spoken word poet, actor, multimedia artist and art facilitator. She is CAMH’s first Artist-in-Wellness, where she also teaches workshops about art therapy. As part of Kuumba, Apanaki’s new exhibition Femme de Fleur is being exhibited at Harbourfront Centre, where, installed in our Craft & Design windows, it will be publicly visible from February 20 onwards. You can follow her work on her Instagram (@apanakitemitayom) or on her website (apanaki-temitayo-m.pixels.com).
