Informed by liturgical spiritual dance, queer ballroom culture, Black radical theory, and the history of painting, Kwamé Azure Gomez (b. 1999; Akron, OH) conjures sweeping migrations across abstract emotional terrains. Working with a combination of oil, acrylic, spray paint, and modeling paste, Gomez moves through canvas intuitively, layering thin washes of color with bold, expressionistic gestures and subtle, often ghostly, suggestions of figuration—human forms, limbs, birds, apples, flowers, letters, and numbers—which appear briefly before receding back into vibrant, chromatic surfaces. With titles drawn from the artist’s writing practice, Gomez’s paintings embody a dynamic interplay of opacity and transparency, at once revealing and withholding.
Gomez’s work is deeply influenced by radical possibilities of movement—its spiritual stamina and kinetics, but also the ways small gestures echo larger migrations and rituals of improvisation become strategies for survival. Gomez grew up immersed in the world of spiritual dance, traveling to churches to perform choreography designed to articulate—frequently in terms quite literal—the messages of religious music. When she moved to Chicago to pursue an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Gomez began to explore the dance rituals of queer nightlife, particularly the history of ballroom and house music. These experiences of movement and expression ultimately formed the foundation of her painting practice. The physicality of Gomez’s process is evident from the marks and gestures visible at the surface. Within these markings, at times, hands slice through air and heels fly—glimpses of the sharp poses and dramatic drops of voguing. Dance—both liturgical and ballroom—operate, for Gomez, as forms of storytelling without the need for linear narrative. Her paintings derive from this same desire for expression, using gesture and movement to articulate what is felt rather than what must be legibly explained.
Gomez has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. Her work has been featured at James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; New Image Art Gallery, West Hollywood, CA; SoLA Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA; Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago, IL; Anthony Gallery Chicago, IL; and Dada Gallery, London, UK, among others. Gomez recently completed the prestigious NXTHVN artist residency in New Haven, CT. In 2022, she received the Emerging Artist grant from New American Paintings; the following year, her work was featured in New American Paintings MFA Issue 165. Gomez earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the University of Akron; she lives and works in New Haven, CT.