Author: Luisa Nannipieri
April Bey is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersections of contemporary and historical narratives surrounding Blackness, queerness, and resistance within globalized culture. Raised in the Bahamas and now based in Los Angeles, Bey draws inspiration from the Afrofuturism movement and the socio-political dynamics of both Atlantica, an imagined utopia, and the real world.
One of her pieces is on display at MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon till march, as a part of the Black Ancient Futures exhibition. A show involving 11 artists from the African diaspora, who employ different languages to propose a wide range of alternative narratives and landscapes that contest the dominant panorama of the contemporary arts.
How were you first involved in the Black Ancient Futures exhibition?
April Bey: I actually know one of the curators of the show (Camila Maissune and João Pinharanda). We had tried to work on a project last year, but we ran into some funding issues and we couldn’t close the deal. But when we parted ways, she told me that we were definitely going to work together at some point. As she started working on this project, she immediately called me: they wanted one of my large installation tapestries from the Atlantica series. She thought that “We Learned to Love Ourselves Until We Were Full, Until We Did Not Need Yours. Until We Realized Our Own Was Enough” was perfect for this exhibit. She was really focused on this piece because it fitted the curatorial narrative. And so, we tracked down the collector who bought it and the collector loaned it on my behalf. They really wanted that tapestry in particular.


Image Courtesy of the Artist
What is “We Learned to Love Ourselves Until We Were Full, Until We Did Not Need Yours. Until We Realized Our Own Was Enough” about?
It is a testament to the journey of self-acceptance, healing, and the reclamation of autonomy in the face of external pressures. The piece reflects a collective narrative of Black bodies, particularly Black women, and queer individuals who have historically been denied love and validation by dominant systems. It embodies the resilience and empowerment that arises when one shifts the gaze inward and begins to cultivate a self-sustaining love rooted in community, culture and personal experience. Through the use of layered textiles, vibrant colors and intricate patterns, I explore the act of “filling” oneself with self-love. The materials represent the beauty in our diversity, and the process of layering speaks to the gradual building of self-worth. The rich textures invite the viewer to reflect on their own journey of fullness, challenging the narrative that we must seek validation from external sources. I think this work is an assertion that Blackness, queerness, and individual identity are inherently valuable, and that the love we find within ourselves and our communities is enough. It is a rejection of the need for approval from systems that have historically dehumanized us. In this fullness, we find liberation, joy, and the realization that our own love and validation are not just enough—they are abundant and transformative.
Have you been able to see the works from the other 10 artists that were involved in the exhibition, what do you think of them?
I’ve seen images of the installations on social media. It looks like the curators shows a lot of installation-based work. I work as a teacher, so I couldn’t make it for the opening, but I’m planning to be there in January and I’m waiting for the catalogue, if there is one coming out. I didn’t know the other artists involved, and I need to see the work in person to be able to answer to this question.
When displaying your art, you usually choose everything surrounding the pieces, and you did the same for the Lisbon’s installation. It’s like the space became a part of the piece itself. Can you tell us why?
Every time I create a piece of work, it comes with an installation guide. It’s really a PDF, with images and measurements, and instructions on color palettes. This tapestry had never been showcased before, and the museum team and my gallery did a really good job in following my instructions. For example, the fact that it had to be installed on a certain type of green background.
For me, the artwork is the physical object and its background is also a part of it. That’s because my practice comes from the premise of me being an alien from another planet, sharing my vision and snapshots of places on my planet. When viewers come to look at the work, I want them to have enough space that envelops them so they can check out temporarily from Earth. And check in to the imagery that I’m trying to show them from my planet, which is called Atlantica. Every piece needs to have its own background to convey to the viewer that now they are off earth. And that I expect them to think a little bit differently and move a little bit differently.
A lot of that imagery is going to include colors similar to the colors I grew up with. In this case, that green color behind the tapestry was the color of my house one year. In the Bahamas, we tended to repaint our houses every year. We would discuss it in the neighborhood, and we would paint our houses in different colors, tropical colors such as green, yellow or minty blue.

Image Courtesy of the Artist

Image Courtesy of the Artist
Atlantica is a concept permeating almost every part of your artistic work wich is deeply rooted in your love of books and Sci-Fi. When did you start developing this idea of another planet?
I think the first show was in 2015, and it was titled Comply. The title was referencing an alien species on Star Trek, the Borg. Then, the second show where I started expanding on that idea, showing deities from this planet and imagining them as undercover celebrities who are really undercover aliens, was titled Made in Space. It was a reference to the made in China textiles that were being trafficked around West Africa. It was during this show that I first named the planet, with a piece titled Welcome to Atlantica. I have been flashing out this world since then.
You said in several interviews that the origin of Atlantica comes from a formative conversation with your father, who used the language of sci-fi to explain racism to a child who was way too young to understand it, telling you that you looked different because you were both aliens from another planet. At the same time, your Atlantica is a really positive and happy place. Your take on Black history is more looking forward to a brilliant future instead of dwelling on a negative past. Why did you choose to focus on this kind of positivity feeling and ideas?
I started researching other black artists when I was in grad school. I wanted to know if they were making work about the same things I was thinking about. And in my researches, I found a lot of artists that were making work referencing racism in America, referencing slavery, referencing present day issues and tying them back to the past. But I was getting really tired of seeing that. I appreciate the fact that every artist has his peculiar focus but when it comes to me, I’m excited about the future. I’m not interested in showing black suffering, poverty or trauma. I just want to show what I see. I grew up in the Bahamas, in the Caribbean. Everything, everybody there is black. Black people are the majority. Which means that seeing a black woman president is not something that’s shocking to me, because we’ve had several black women in the Bahamas running for prime minister. But here in the US, that’s a revolutionary and very different image. What I’m trying to show and illustrate in my work is what the future looks like to me.
How did moving to America influence your practice and the themes you decided to focus on?
America is a very unique place. Growing up in the Bahamas, we don’t talk about each other like white, black or anything like that. It’s either you’re Bahamian or you’re a tourist. That’s it. When I came to the US, I was 16. I had to fill out a lot of forms to go to school and everything else and they were always telling me to check the black box for race. And I was so confused! That’s not something me and my friends talked about. There is no such thing as black culture in the Bahamas. Rap was just what we listened to, BET was just a channel that we had, among others. Then, when I started going to school here, the black people would sit on one side of the cafeteria and everybody else would sit on another side. Everybody seemed segregated, it’s a segregated country. As for me, I didn’t know where to go. I don’t know, is there a Bahamian table?
The work I’m making right now, that I’ve always made actually, is asking people to see the absurdity of that. I really was an alien. I didn’t know how I was supposed to move and I was not used to people watching me as much. The Bahamas is such a small country. Everybody knows everybody. When I was a kid, I couldn’t get in trouble, because everybody was watching. If I went to the mall when I was supposed to be in school, somebody worked there that knew my family. But here, everybody just kind of look out for themselves. The imagery of Black people that I started seeing here didn’t match with my own experience, and I wanted people to see that. America is just one country. It’s big and mighty, or whatever, but it is still just one country. There are so many different places that treat women differently, that treat black people differently, and that also don’t talk about race every single day.
I think that this is how the move impacted my work.

Image Courtesy of the Artist

Image Courtesy of the Artist
You are an avid reader and you said that one of the things you like when reading a book is that you are free to imagine the characters as you want. Such as, and I quote: “I’m still going to see Hermione with a big afro, and that’s how I’ve always seen Hermione reading the character.” But a big part of your work, including in the Atlantica series, revolves around portraits. Why did it become important to you?
The premise of being an alien from another planet also is aligned with the narrative of us being undercover and also us having the power to change our appearance. Typically, in sci-fi stories, when an alien comes to earth, they take on the appearance of us. So that we don’t freak out. I can tie that back to an Octavia Butler series in which they do just that to save humanity, who destroyed the planet. I like to do portraits because I think it’s interesting to create a beautiful portrait and tell someone here on earth that that’s the alien. Looking at it, we don’t really know what this portrait is of. We don’t know if this is the final version of them or if they can transform. And they can. Like in Atlantica. The lore of Atlantica is that we can duplicate our limbs, we can change the color of our skin, we can choose to have no skin. And so, any interpretation of those humanoid aspects of appearance is to emulate earthlings, emulate humanity. And, sometimes, the portraits are beautiful because humanity is.

You also take great care in the materials you use, and your pieces are especially layered. There is this materiality to it that is striking.
I try to be sustainable in the studio. When I have institutions purchase textiles for my installation, we keep it. And then I turn that into other artwork that usually goes into the Equity and Collecting Program, which is a program that helps marginalized collectors collect work. And the layering, it comes from wanting to use as much of the material as possible, but also wanting to push and pull the foreground. It’s a way of working that comes from going through the art academic system without any money at all to buy art supplies. When I was a student, I would go to Home Depot, which is a home improvement store here in the US, to get most of my supplies. And now, I’m a professor, I teach art, and I make my students go to a home improvement store so they can make the piece that I’m asking them to make. It became the way I practice: I try to figure out how to make something work with the supply I have at my disposal and I do enough research to figure out the most economical and sustainable way to produce what I’m trying to see in the work.

You incorporate colorful faux fur, glitter, vinyl and woven textiles in your pieces. This kind of esthetics is rooted in your Bahamian upbringing?
In the Bahamas, we have carnivals and others events which are all very closely related to West African tradition and that definitely inspired my work. The costumes we use match all of the colors that I use in my pieces. We also use a lot of glitter and sequins in the costumes for a parade called Junkanoo. The Junkanoo is like a competition, that we take very seriously. Throughout the year, different teams, made up of groups that are assigned to different neighborhoods on the island, collect materials to make costumes: originally it was junk, all of our excess. They work on the costumes and they practice dancing, they rehearse music with drums and cowbells, to put together a performance for this parade. And then at the end of the parade, they get judged. Usually, the parade takes place on New Year’s and Christmas. But, if we have special events, there is always a Junkanoo crew that step up. It’s actually both a competition and a part of our cultural history which dates back all the way to Benin.
Unlike other contemporary artists, you usually choose very specific titles for your pieces. How does it work?
I write down a lot of text every day: from what I’m reading, from what I’m listening to, music, lyrics, what I hear on the TV… A lot of it is also things that my friends say. When I finish an artwork, I go through all the things I’ve written down to find something that resonates with the portrait or with what is going on in the image. A lot of the titles are silly things I say or words I made up.


You are not only an artist but also a full-time professor at Glendale Community College (near Long Beach, California). Why did you choose this career, how does it impact your practice and vice versa?
I like teaching. I’m good at it. Even if I don’t like the system I have to teach in. When I choose my major at first, I went with art education, because I knew I wanted to teach. But I learned in my first year that I don’t want to teach children, nor middle schoolers or high schoolers. So, I switched my major to focus on my practice, because that’s what I was told to do if I wanted to teach adults. In the end, the teaching and my practice inform each other.
My teaching philosophy is heavily related to a book titled The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The concept is that you can’t possibly teach someone something if you aren’t also learning parallel with them. When I wanted to learn paper making, for example, I made that an assignment in my class and we learned paper making together. It means I make mistakes in front of the students, they make mistakes in front of me, and then together we form the proper technique to make the actual artwork for the assignment. I also teach things that I do in my own studio, so students can see how that translates into a contemporary art practice. But teaching also keeps me up to date. Every single year I’m going to know what the code of conduct is for museum-artist relationships. As we attend the College Arts Association, we get updates about what the new form and the new practice are. It is a requirement to teach that directly helps my practice.
Last year I had a sabbatical from teaching and I realized that I need teaching so that I can interact with certain types of people that speak to me in certain types of ways. In the art world, you don’t know who is going to come into your inbox and how they’re going to talk to you. In my classroom, the students speak to me and they email me with respect. We are all there for the same reason. We’re all there to learn. And it’s a different environment that has a little bit more control and intelligence than, sometimes, the art world has. Whenever I get irritated with the art world, I focus on my students. Whenever I get irritated with the system of academia, I go back to art. The sabbatical taught me that I need both, or I’ll go crazy.

Image Courtesy of the Artist

Image Courtesy of the Artist
What did you do during your sabbatical?
I moved my first solo show to another museum, I had my first show in Paris. And I also rewrote all of the classes that I teach.
Can you tell us more about your Equity in Collecting Program?
The Equity in Collecting Program is designed for the people who have supported my practice but are marginalized in one way or another. It allows them to collect the work that they support. The works are priced as they should be in accordance with the artists worth and market value, but the supplemental 90% discount will act as a leveling agent to provide access to potential collectors otherwise excluded. It came about because I myself can’t afford to buy my work. The fact that I qualify for this program really messed with my mind and it still kind of bothers me, actually…
Round one and two sold out. Round three and four are going to drop December 5th, which is around Art Basel Miami time. I try to have them come out in correspondence with art fairs that I’m participating in because the marginalized collectors always go to art fairs, just to see what’s available or and to support the artists.

How does the program work?
The only difference with a collector buying work normally is that I vet the collectors first. I have an application process where I ask: how long have you been following me? Why do you consider yourself marginalized? What is your need? And then, I send them the contact information to my galleries. At that point, it’s like a regular art sale: my gallery reaches out to them to present the works that are available in this program, and they choose the one they want. I give them a 90% discount, which is the equity discount, and they buy the work just like a regular collector. Then, the gallery ships it off and now they’re a collector. That’s how it works. A lot of them are close people that have supported me, so I have met almost all of them. They are history professors at community colleges that were directors of the art gallery gave me my first solo show, they are writers, they are critics, a lot of them are queer people and mostly young black collectors. If I haven’t met them in person, they post or they email me and they’re always super proud to show me where they install the piece.

To conclude this interview, can you tell us what are you working on right now and how do you think the Atlantica project is going to evolve?
Right now, I’m working with my friend Akwasi Brenya-Mensa. He is a chef from London and Ghana and this collaboration is about designing dishes based on Atlantica. We are going to present this project, those foods we would have on Atlantica, in my next solo museum show, in about a year from now. I’m also working on a new solo show for my gallery in the Bahamas. It turns out it will open on November 21st, which is my mom’s birthday. It will be my second show in the island. Back home, the reception is always great. They have been my biggest supporters since the beginning: even when I was a student, my art dealer, Amanda Colson, was supporting me. It’s the way the art world works in the Bahamas, we support each other.