Belkis Ayón

Created during the artist’s residency at RISD, this print features the visual language Ayón developed for the obscure myths of Abakuá, an all-male Afro-Cuban secret society that forbids figurative representation. The wide, intense eyes and mouthless faces of the figures inhabit a world suffused with symbol and ritual. To accentuate the sense of mystery, Ayón inked only two areas of the sheet, letting the blind embossing of the collograph-a technique that uses collaged elements to make impressions into the surface of the paper-carry subtle information.