Bio
Kevin Claiborne is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose work explores the intersections of identity, social environment, and mental health within the Black American experience. Working across collage, silkscreen, photography, painting, and sculpture, Claiborne often incorporates language as material to find new ways of reinterpreting history and its relevance to the present. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, an M.S. in Higher Education from Syracuse University, and a B.S. in Mathematics from North Carolina Central University, a historically Black college.
Kevin currently lives and works in Harlem, New York City.
Artist Statement
My practice is rooted in the exploration of intergenerational trauma, memory, and mental health within the Black experience—particularly the psychological burdens that shape identity. History, for me, is both a question and a tool: I seek to use it not just to reflect the past, but to reframe how we understand the present. Beginning with the gaps in my own family’s history—the space between ‘what I know’ and ‘what I should know’—I probe the sediment of inherited, erased, and avoided histories to better understand where my ancestors come from and how that informs my own existence today.
Image and text are key to my work, often woven together as material to construct and deconstruct meaning. I play with language, reshaping it into poems and new forms, experimenting with legibility to change how both image and text function, individually and in tandem. This dynamic approach lets me not only reframe history but approach my own narrative through a lens of transformation and possibility.
I work in series, shifting between mediums as my practice evolves. Drawing from my family archive and personal library, I reappropriate found images, integrate my own poetry, and experiment with collage, photography, silkscreen, and painting. In this way, my work becomes a method of exploring and expanding the stories we inherit—engaging broader conversations about narrative ownership, the reframing of history, and the role of storytelling in survival.
Contact
Email: info@kevinclaiborne.com
Instagram: @kevinclaiborne