Mouminatou Thiaw is a Senegalese American artist born in Dakar, Senegal, currently living and working in Nashville, TN. She explores closeness with the earth, grief, faith, migration, isolation, connectivity and organic life in her works to develop Africanist and Womanist iconographies for storytelling. With painting, collage, printmaking, and sculpture, she pulls from corporeal connection and memory to respond to both her internal and external worlds. She layers color to suggest the illusory textures of human memory, and creates from the roundness, warmth and color of her childhood imagination. Informed by her curatorial scholarship, Thiaw regards creative exploration and art literacy as central to critical and hopeful thinking about representations of race, identity, the body, and the earth.