Artists › Laura Arminda Kingsley
Laura Arminda Kingsley is a Swiss-Dominican-American artist based in Zurich.
Kingsley was born in 1984 in Ohio, U.S.A., to Dominican parents. L.A. Kingsley grew up in Santo Domingo, and the artist’s first impressions were formed in this luscious Caribbean metropolis of magical-realist contrasts. The strong imprint left by a Caribbean childhood is palpable in Kingsley’s work.
In 2004, after completing an associate degree in Fine Arts and Illustration at Altos de Chavón, the School of Design in La Romana, Dominican Republic, L.A. Kingsley migrated to New York. Brooklyn’s Afro-Caribbean diaspora and the many hours spent perusing the collections of the city’s museums greatly informed Kingsley’s adulthood and art. While working as a design consultant in a frame shop and as a teacher’s assistant in the Ceramics Department at Hunter College, Kingsley completed a BA in 2012. Kingsley obtained an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2014 and shortly after moved to Zurich, Switzerland. There, Kingsley has worked as an art educator at the Aargauer Museum and as a freelance theater sculptor for the Zurich Opera and Ballet.
Kingsley’s work has been exhibited at the Zurich HB; the Museum of Modern Art and Altos de Chavón in the Dominican Republic; the Asian Art Museum, Southern Exposure, Luggage Store Annex, Heron Arts, Oliver Art Center, and Isabelle Percy West Gallery in San Francisco and Oakland; Taller Boricua Gallery, Sidney Mishkin Gallery, and the Thomas Hunter Project Space in New York; and Casa Escute, Interamerican Gallery, the Art Gallery of the Humanities Department of the University of Puerto Rico, and the Department of State in Puerto Rico. In early 2021, Kingsley’s video work "Murmurs of the Deep" will be shown in the exhibition "New Media Art" at the CICA Museum in South Korea.
"My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe."
Ana Mendieta
In my work, I look at the Atlantic through the lens of deep time, giving equal importance to the microscopic and the macroscopic, folklore and science, the magic and the real, and the archaic and the new, to offer the viewer a non-hierarchical view of the natural world and human history.
This necessity to use my imagination, science, and history to gain a new historical perspective surged out of my grappling with painful realities. In particular, the rampant pollution of the Caribbean Sea I witnessed as a child, the institution of slavery and its legacy in my community, but foremost my desire not to let these realities define me.
In my series "Murmurs of the Deep," I’ve created a world in which our communion with the cosmos and nature is unmediated by cultural valuations and static ideas of identity. The deep doesn’t know nor care for our morals and prejudices, and so it simultaneously embraces and devours us.
The deep murmurs
of the myriad life-forms that sprung
from its crevices eons ago;
the civilizations that voyaged on its surface;
the secrets of the Ife
as told by the many lives it gobbled up
and lastly of eons to come,
when all the noise has gone.
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