April 21st - May 28th, 2022

Colonial Swag

April Bey

Colonial Swag, a solo exhibition of paintings, tapestries and mixed media by artist April Bey. Raised in Nassau on the island of New Providence in The Bahamas and currently residing in Los Angeles, Bey’s interdisciplinary work combines American and Bahamian visual culture and contemporary pop culture into potent and imaginative social critique. Her work incorporates elements of feminism, generational theory, Afrofuturism, Afro-surrealism and constructs of race within supremacist systems. TERN’s first solo exhibition of Bey’s trenchant work, Colonial Swag, will be on view from April 21 to May 28, 2022, with an opening reception on April 21st, 2022, at 7p.m.

Bey’s artworks are often crafted around the perspective of the fictional planet Atlantica, an Afrofuturist alien world which redefines Blackness outside the context of white supremacy and colonial suffering. Identified by the artist as her true point of origin, the planet was named in reference to stories her Black father told her as a way to explain racism, colourism, texturism and identity when she was a child. From the perspective of extraterrestrial observation and interplanetary transcendence, Bey’s works free Black expression from the politics and victimization of Earth’s ingrained power relations, imagining entirely separate realms and histories where no proverbial “isms” exist, glitter is currency and all inhabitants are glorious in their forms of free expression.

For her exhibition at TERN, Bey will exhibit two-dimensional mixed-media works and installations from her ongoing Colonial Swag series. Colonial Swag is a “high-fashion luxury brand on Atlantica that uses fully sustainable, ethically mined colonialism from Earth’s developing countries to create beautiful, priceless pieces of fashion.”