PROFILE

OPPOSITE: ruby
onyinyechi amanze
in front of her work,
Kisses at a Beach with
a Hammock for Audre
(To Learn to Pray) (2015).
THIS PAGE: From top:
Skies in Odd Places
(2018); 10 Litres of Air
(The Divers II) (2016)

Artist in Wonderland
The official artist of the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at
Frieze New York in 2019, ruby onyinyechi amanze explores concepts of space,
identity and belonging through a recurring menagerie of hybrid characters
By Clint McLean

The notion of home is complex when you are from a number of places,
and a product of all and none at the same time. Artist ruby onyinyechi
amanze – spelled without capital letters by her aesthetic preference
– was raised on three continents and considers Lagos, London,
Brooklyn and Philadelphia all home, yet feels no connection to any of
them. “Home can be many different places,” she explains, “not just
geographical places with borders and points on a map, but mental,
emotional and spiritual places that you can go between very easily.”
The critical theorist Homi Bhabha may call this a ‘third space’ – a
new place created by colliding cultures that enables the possibility
of something different and potentially better than its origins. In
amanze’s artwork, home is a Wonderland for hybrid beings who
soar, dive, float, fall, dance, lumber, tumble, run, jerk and lounge
across great empty expanses, while objects such as birds, plants,
motorcycles, Astroturf and architectural elements project a sense of
place – but, intentionally, not a very specific one; this home is not

6 0 -6 1 • WERTE I N TERNATIONAL
PROFILE
“The characters in Aliens, Hybrids and Ghosts came because
I was living in Nigeria as an adult for the first time and creating
a narrative about being an alien in that space”
static. As for her most recent works, they look increasingly at the use
of space and the ways to physically manipulate the two-dimensional
plane of the paper. They are playful explorations rendered in ink,
graphite, colored pencils and photo transfers.
Amanze was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1982, while her
parents were still students. Shortly after her birth, the family
emigrated to Birmingham in the UK, where her father pursued a
PhD in Biological Chemistry and her mother an MA in Education. In
1995, just as amanze hit her teens, the family moved to the US. It was
the year Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P Murrah Federal
Building; the year of Toy Story, the first computer-animated feature
film; and the year OJ Simpson was pronounced innocent. Amanze’s
first memory on US soil is of her new home in the suburbs of
Philadelphia. “I remember the house feeling very American. It was
big by our former British standards and had a finished basement
and an attic, just like the TV shows of American life we’d watched.
On the corner was a small mom-and-pop store that sold hoagies
[sandwiches] and on the other corner was a tattoo shop and a church.”
In high school, amanze took advantage of a strong arts program,
practically living in the art studios. A Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA)
seemed a natural next step. Her parents “mildly discouraged” her
creative pursuits, hoping they were a phase. “At the time,” amanze
says, “it wasn’t part of the immigrant story to say you want to study
art or be an artist.”
Amanze received a BFA – summa cum laude – from Philadelphia’s
Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in 2004. Two years later, she
graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the esteemed Cranbrook
Academy of Art, near Detroit, Michigan, which was followed by
teaching jobs. In 2009, she was hired as the Director of Education at
the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn,
New York. During this period amanze was also active in group
exhibitions throughout the US as well as New York, where she
showed ‘Works on Paper’ at the South Shore Art Center in 2007 and
held an exhibition at The Cooper Union School of Art in 2011, capping
off the residency she had just completed there. Her work then was
already investigating themes of home and hybridity, but in abstract
form, void of figures and relying on ink more than graphite.
In 2012, the artist was awarded a Fulbright teaching and research
scholarship that took her back to Nigeria for only the third time since
leaving as an infant. The trip marked a turning point in her work as
she moved from abstract to figurative artworks. It was during this
TH E S E PAG E S A ND PRE V IOUS PAG ES : E MI LY JOH NSTON (PORTRA I T) ;
time that amanze unleashed the characters that would become the
central figures of her ongoing body of work, Aliens, Hybrids and Ghosts.
“The characters came because I was living in Nigeria as an
C OU RTE S Y OF TH E A RTI ST A ND G O ODM A N GA LL E RY
adult for the first time and creating a narrative about being
an alien in that space,” amanze shares. “But also, it was a familiar
TWIN: A PERFORMANCE home space, so there was a back and forth between those two extremes
and I wanted to look at that through the lens of these other beings and
+ DRAWING not as a self-portrait.”
Ada the alien was the first character to arrive. Except for her
On Friday May 3, 2019 at Frieze fluorescent yellow skin, she is the mirror image of amanze. She has
New York, from 12.30pm to 4pm, the lithe, angular limbs of a dancer and seems introspective, self-
amanze will be performing live with
longstanding collaborator Wura-Natasha assured and perhaps a little melancholy. Audre, the leopard-headed
Ogunji on the lawn outside the north man, appeared next. He is aloof but protective, and it is clear that he
entrance of the fair on Randall's Island. and Ada have a thing. They dance, they embrace, and in 10 Litres of
For more information, please visit
db.com/art or scan the QR code above
Air (The Divers II) (2016), Audre pins Ada under one arm as she plunges
using your smart device. downward, dressed in a bathing suit and space helmet. Or maybe he
62-6 3 • WERTE I N TERNATIONAL
is stopping her from floating up and out of Wonderland? In The
Divers (2016) it is the other way around, with Ada holding Audre as
they sink or rise together.
As the characters and chapters of the Hybrids series progressed,
with exhibitions in Ohio, Lagos, London and New York, amanze
became less interested in exploring ideas of hybridity and more
interested in the actual space – the voluminous zero-gravity white
of the paper that her characters occupy.
“I think there’s something in the drawing process and in the
larger context of how one can move through space,” she says.
“There’s something magical about that. Also, on the paper plane, to
be able to move and push and pull, and create entrances and windows
and alleyways, and all of these things that suggest the space is the
meat of the work and less the issue of cultural hybridity.”
Amanze recently began to add physical depth to her paper. She
made some of her drawings three-dimensional, using wooden forms,
deep shadow boxes, or layers of resin to manipulate space beyond the
paper’s surface. Her 2015 exhibition ‘Salt Water’ at Johannesburg’s
Goodman Gallery showcased several of these sculptural drawings.
Deutsche Bank's Art, Culture & Sports department acquired their
first work by amanze in the same year, for their London office, and
has now seized the opportunity to make her the official artist of the
Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at Frieze New York.
Sitting in the third-floor studio of the house that she and her
husband bought in Philadelphia, not far from where her family went
to church when she was growing up, amanze says that creating
sculptural drawings is the most exciting part of her practice right now.
She adds: “Part of the process is discovering ways that the paper can
hold physical weight and have a presence in the space it is in, and
how it can physically engage with the viewer and the architecture.
That comes from what happens inside the drawings – allowing the
drawn world to become a three-dimensional world as well.”
But to amanze, the drawings were never flat. She sees depth in
her paper the way that a sculptor of marble may see a form hidden
in a slab of rock. She physically enters the drawings when she works,
lying on them and leaving marks and impressions of herself as she
dances her characters across the stage of heavy cotton paper. In her
large works, there is room for you, the viewer, in the space of the
drawing as well. So, whether you are one of the multitudes who
share a relationship to space akin to amanze’s or not, you can still
visit Wonderland, if only for a moment.
OPPOSITE: From
top: in The Divers
(2016), amanze's alter
ego Ada the alien is
pictured with her
leopard-headed lover
Audre; amanze (right)
performing live with
Wura-Natasha Ogunji