Kesha Bruce's Page

Kesha Bruce’s work combines painting and photography to explore
memory, history, and magical-spiritual belief.

The narrative elements originate from a religious upbringing that fused
Southern Baptist tradition with both African and Native American belief
systems, and quickly became the basis for her life-long fascination with
folklore, superstition, and storytelling.

Kesha Bruce studied painting at the University of Iowa before earning her
MFA from Hunter College in New York. In 2004 she was awarded a Painting
Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and in 2005 she
received a Puffin Foundation Grant for her work with Artist Books.

In 2008, her photographic work from the "(Re)calling and (Re)telling" series
was exhibited at El Taller Boricua Gallery in New York after being chosen for
the En Foco New Works Photography Award.

Works from her "(Re)calling and (Re)telling" are included in the traveling exhibition “Double Exposure: African Americans Before and Behind the Camera.” which opened in June 2008 at the Museum of the African Diaspora and will continue onto several venues in the United States through 2011. Her photographic work is also part of the permanent collection of The Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut.