AMBROSE
Ambrose is an emerging artist from Western North Carolina with roots in Florida. She is a self-taught painter and seamstress who received her BA in African-American Studies from Yale College in 2018, concentrating in arts & culture. She also spent six months studying Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in London, exposing her to new ways of creating, documenting and experimenting as an artist. Much of her artistic practice now lends itself to experimentation: Painting and cutting up, making, undoing and re-making. She creates tactile, multi-layered and mystical scenes as a method to sew herself and the stories that she grew up hearing, witnessing and imagining into the fabric of our collective consciousness. Ambrose combines her paintings of faces into intricate collages with fabric she has hand-dyed or sourced from thrift stores, fabric stores or her own closet. The figures she incorporates into her work morph into ancestors or angel figures weaving their stories into large-scale, quilt-like pieces with materials like silk, lace, and cotton. Her experience in liberation movement and social justice spaces across the South continues to inform her praxis as a Black, queer, southern artist who strives to create work that heals, transforms and makes tangible impact for Black and Indigenous people of color and our communities. She recently completed a year-long residency at the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production in Utica, MS as their inaugural Artist-In-Residence. Ambrose has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including Presidential Scholar in the Arts, Gordon Grand and Cohen Public Service Fellowships, SpiritHouse Inc. Sankofa Cultural Alchemist Award, and most recently, Alternate ROOTS Project Development Grant.
AMBROSE’S LIST
BOOKS
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow
Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone: Poems by Thiahera Nurse
In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the New World by Judith Carney
Kindred by Octavia Butler
VIDEOS
Nikky Finney’s National Book Award Acceptance Speech, 2011
Maya Angelou on the Noble Story of Black Womanhood Interview with Bill Moyers
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Chroma, Grace, Takademe, Revelations (2015)
