Following her commissioned site-specific installation NETWORK for the Menil Drawing Institute, Marcia Kure continues to explore the complex histories of trade and migration through painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage. Through abstraction, Kure asks how visible and invisible structures can be dissolved into line.

Reticulation investigates our shared responsibility in perpetuating networks of migration and exchange. Kure uses line as mark, metaphor, memory, and systems tracker. Using canvas soaked and marked with natural pigment—indigo and kola nut—the artist places pressure on the material components of her drawings as commodities that map the movement of bodies through time. Here Kure references the curvilinear shape of the Uli line, a Nigerian design motif traditionally drawn on the body. Treating the canvas as skin, these marks become a site of remembrance, holding within them histories of colonization and exploitation.

Marcia Kure (b. 1970) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores post-colonial existentialist ideas and identities. Based in both Nigeria and the United States, Kure employs a range of material strategies to address historical, existing, and potential systems of power. Kure’s work has been seen recently at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston; Alexander McQueen, London; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, and the Wanås Konst Sculpture Park, Knislinge. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the British Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC, among others.