Kearra Amaya Gopee is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York, NY). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing, and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. They render this violence elastic and a-temporal - leaving ample room for the consideration and manipulation of its history, implications on the present, and possible afterlives.
In the spirit of maroonage, Gopee has been developing an artist residency in Trinidad and Tobago titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. They hold a M.F.A. from UCLA, a B.F.A. in photography and imaging from NYU, and are an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They were a 2023 fellow at Queer Art, a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and will be an artist in residence at Headlands and the Center for Photography, Woodstock in 2024 and 2023, respectively.
At MacDowell, Gopee edited a new experimental video to be premiered at the Kitchen as part of their Video Viewing Room program during Fall 2023.
Portrait by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr
