STAGING - The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Americas Society are co-organizing Kelly Sinnapah Mary, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. On view at The Aldrich from February 7 to June 14, 2027 and at Americas Society from April 14 to July 31, 2027, it will bring together a comprehensive view of her work to date and will include approximately forty paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and installations across two immersive institutional environments including the debut of new work. It will be accompanied by the artist’s first monograph, co-published by The Aldrich and Americas Society, featuring full-color plates, a joint essay by the curators, and a text by a guest contributor.

Born and based in Saint-François, Guadeloupe, the practice of Kelly Sinnapah Mary (b. 1981) is inspired by her lineage, Indian and Caribbean folklore and literature, and a deep reverence for the natural world. Sinnapah Mary’s work draws from her surroundings in the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas department and region, and her personal journey uncovering her family’s genealogy. Through her artistic research, Sinnapah Mary learned more about her ancestral past as a descendant of indentured workers brought from South India to the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century.

Employing a visionary world building to explore her heritage, the artist resuscitates Indian culture, and traditions absent from her upbringing using a cast of chimeric characters, predominantly female, that merge with nature to confront the enduring legacies of colonialism. Constructed as stories within a larger metanarrative, such as the Notebooks of No Return, Fables of Sanbras, and the Book of Violette, Sinnapah Mary’s protagonists are loosely based on herself and family members, conveying and embodying symbolic imagery adapted from the artist’s lived reality, the geography and geopolitical history of her birthplace, and inherited accounts.

This exhibition is composed as two new chapters of an ongoing visual tale that begins with drawing and expands outward to survey her paintings, sculptures and installations in a rich entanglement of inherited memory, imaginative narration, and historical testimony. Resisting cultural erasure and challenging colonialism’s systemic patriarchal racism, Sinnapah Mary’s mesmeric compositions cast shape-shifting heroines within lush island landscapes. Absent of anthropocentric hierarchies, these mythical realms foster abundant and evocative interspecies relationships grounded in themes of resistance, cultivation, and self-determination. Informed by the writings of celebrated Caribbean authors and critics, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and Suzanne Césaire, Sinnapah Mary invents a “new world,” a fusion of creation mythology, surrealism, and the political ideologies of anti-colonialism and ecofeminism to navigate private and collective storylines about trauma, displacement, hope, and hybrid diasporic space.

Kelly Sinnapah Mary was born in 1981 in Saint-François, Guadeloupe, where she currently lives and works.

Kelly Sinnapah Mary is co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Americas Society. It is co-curated by The Aldrich's Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart and the Americas Society's Director and Chief Curator Aimé Iglesias Lukin.

Kelly Sinnapah Mary (b. 1981, Guadeloupe) holds a degree in visual art from Toulouse University. Her work has been shown both in Guadeloupe and internationally at institutions including James Cohan, New York, NY; Aicon Gallery, New York, NY; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Peréz Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; IDB Gallery, Washington, DC; Osage Foundation, Hong Kong; Foundation Clément, Le François, Martinique; and the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil. She has been featured in major group exhibitions including The Earth, The Fire, The Water and The Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil; Non-Residency, at Jaipur Centre for Art, Jaipur, India, both in 2025; Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940, at the Modern Museum of Fort Worth, TX, in 2024; everything slackens in a wreck, curated by Andil Gosine, at the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, in 2022, and Very Small Feelings at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India, in 2023. She was awarded the inaugural CPGA-Villa Albertine Étant Donnés Prize at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025.