Hailed by the International Review of African American Art as “An Artist to Watch”, Maya Freelon Asante is an award-winning visual artist who has been influenced and mentored by artistic visionaries, Emma Amos and Faith Ringgold. Exploring the boundaries of mixed-media, Asante infuses vibrant tissue paper with printmaking, photography, collage and sculpture to create an array of color saturated imagery, which has been praised by Philadelphia City Paper as “joyous and spectacular”. Asante’s bold designs utilize tissue ink in order to accentuate her emotive subjects, which often include strength, unity, growth, and ancestral reverence.

Awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2006, Asante’s artwork has also received acclaim from the Boston News Network television station, and international poet laureate, Maya Angelou, who stated, “She observes and visualizes the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being”.

In 2007, Maya Freelon Asante graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with a Master’s of Fine Art and began teaching at Morgan State University and Towson University in Baltimore, MD. She has worked with distinguished artist and scholar, Deborah Willis and helped coordinate the second African and African American Art and Film Conference, entitled “Here and Now”, which was held at New York University. Asante was also invited to Ghana by Renee Neblett, founder of the Kokrobitey Institute, as an artist-in-residence for their International Printmaking Workshop.

Philadelphia’s historic Brandywine Workshop hosted Maya Freelon Asante as a Young Artist Fellow in the Fall of 2008 where she worked with Founder and President, Allan Edmunds on a limited edition print entitled ‘Look Down On War’, which is a tribute to her great-grandfather, artist and educator, Allan Freelon, Sr. The prints, along with other recent work have also been collected by major institutions including the University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center and the The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists.

In the Spring of 2009, Maya Freelon Asante was the Visiting Artist Fellow for the Sonja Haynes Stone Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; she went on to have a solo exhibition at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, in Baltimore, MD, where she lives and works. Maya Freelon Asante was recently awarded the C. Sylvia and Eddie C. Brown Studio at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, where she will participate in monthly open studios.

Photo: Ryan Joseph