Collage Workshop with Diana Blain Fine

Diana Blain Fine is a visual artist from The Gambia whose works across photography, collage, painting and installation represents her engagement with societal norms around beauty and power in Africa and the West; norms that incubated in the shadow of colonialism, Western primacy and aesthetic ideals that continue to reverberate today some six or more decades after we’ve regained our independence. The work interrogates the ways in which Western ideas of purity of body and beauty have left an indelible imprint on local and diasporic communities some six or more decades after we’ve regained our independence. Diana places herself in much of her work as both the objectified and objectifier, the ill-favored and the aspiration to create a visual portal for bearing witness to and engaging with the practices and messaging around beauty, skin, otherness/ blackness and power. Her work is an offering, an invitation to take an unflinching look at what we take in as consumers and what we ultimately make of ourselves in our human need for worth, power and social advancement. Diana is a graduate of Columbia University with a B.A. degree in Sociology. An artist and a farmer, she currently lives on her farm in rural upstate New York.