Tyanna Buie’s “In Celebration” (2017). Her exhibit, After Image, opens at MMoCA on May 3.
Artist Tyanna Buie’s earliest recollection is being dropped off with her three siblings to live with a friend of her mother, a drug addict who promptly vanished from the then 3-year-old girl’s daily life. It was a prelude to Buie eventually entering the state of Illinois foster care system, where she stayed until “aging out” at 18.
“My mom couldn’t take care of us,” says Buie, now 35. She and her siblings stayed with the friend for a year before moving in with her aunt, a nurse and single mother of five children, one of whom had an infant of her own. By Chicago housing standards, the aunt’s home wasn’t large enough to legally house so many people.
Tyanna Buie is an assistant professor in printmaking at Detroit's College of Creative Studies.
Buie was in third grade when a social worker removed the four siblings from their aunt’s care, citing signs of both emotional and physical abuse. The social worker split up the children, sending Buie and her sister to live with a variety of legally recognized foster parents in Chicago and Milwaukee.
“Those were my formative years,” says Buie, who currently serves as assistant professor and section chair in printmaking at Detroit’s College of Creative Studies. “Forgiveness is part of the ongoing conversation, but we did not leave my aunt on good terms.”
Buie, who went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in art from Western Illinois University and a master’s degree in fine arts from UW-Madison, has come to terms with those years in Tyanna Buie: After Image, a new exhibit opening May 3 at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s State Street Gallery. By scanning and manipulating the few family photos she has — along with other tatters from those fractured formative years — Buie has re-created a past defined by stylized imagery and objects that promote positive images of a family she wished had been more supportive.
The show’s eight large-scale portraits, reproduced and enhanced from those scanned photos, measure 96 inches by 84 inches, resulting in a highly dramatic impact, according to MMoCA curator Leah Kolb.
“She is exploring the idea of lost memories and objects and rewriting her past through this process,” Kolb says. “It’s a genuine exploration of what it means to encounter, embrace and accept a tough childhood.”
In addition to screen prints, Buie’s exhibit also includes “Estate Sale,” a mural that will run the length of the gallery’s back wall. The artwork, consisting of imagery, handprints and adjacent three-dimensional objects, such as lamps and hot combs, encompasses what few mementos Buie brought with her from childhood. The work’s name implies that she’s looking to rid herself of such things, or the memories associated with them.
In fact, Buie says, this exhibit will serve as the finale to this phase of her artistic career. Subsequent work will likely take her in new directions and away from visually exorcising demons from her past.
“”Estate Sale’ is an attempt at a visual purge of those images,” Buie says. “As they say, ‘everything must go.’”
