Watch the Recording

SOU Meese Auditorium – Art Building (next to the SMA)
555 Indiana Street | Ashland OR 97520
FREE, and open to the public | FREE Parking

Join us on Thursday, January 23, 2025 at 2 pm for a Creative Industries Discussion with our 2025 SOU VAST (Visiting Artist & Scholar in Teaching) resident Louise Mandumbwa.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Louise Mandumbwa (born 1996, Francistown, Botswana) is an artist working in painting, printmaking and drawing to explore ideations of home, figurative and botanical works. Her practice is a counter mapping endeavor examining the ranging registers or memory through material exploration, the illegible image and failed translation. An immigrant artist her works revisits sites of both familial and diasporic history to and appends them with affect and the anecdotal.

Louise holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale university as well as a BFA in Painting from the University of Central Arkansas. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Sakhile&Me (Frankfurt, DE, 2025), Chili Art Projects (London, UK 2024), Spurs Gallery (Beijing, CN), David Castillo (Miami, FL), The Wright Museum (Metroit, MI) and Yossi Milo (New York, NY). She was a 2024 recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshield foundation and the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks award from Yale University. She has completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts (New Berlin, NY 2022) and Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution (Chautauqua, NY 2019) and Louise lives and works in New Haven, CT

Artist Statement

Through the gestures of painting, drawing and printmaking, Louise Mandumbwa’s practice explores ideations of home from her perspective as the daughter and granddaughter of intra-continental immigrants from Zambia, Angola, and the Congo, in addition to her experience as an immigrant herself in the US.

By engaging collective memory and personal history, her work considers what is made possible when recognizable images and language begin to fall away. Employing the anecdote, the fragmented recollection and the haptic, Mandumbwa offers a translated affect and context that produces an iteration of a place that is not here. Drawing from transcribed conversations, familial archives, and her own recollections of the vibrant, changing cities she’s called home, Louise contends with the gaps in knowledge that are often part of a diasporic experience by engaging a constellations of epistemologies. Thinking about the archive as a record of a temporal experience of material realities, Mandumbwa captures those experiences  through language, image and object.

Her material vocabulary includes those commonly used to construct the homes in  Southern Africa; rendering works in graphite, charcoal, paint and ink onto concrete, wood, cast metal and glass. Her practice holds space for the ephemeral and the constant, as well as the loss and recollection built into the translation of place. Making memories into material and affect into image.

More information at: https://louisemandumbwa.com/