marks, histories
trade, labor, power
A contemporary drawing and sculptural practice exploring inscription, networks and embodied histories
Biography
Marcia Kure lives and works between the United States and Nigeria. Her multidisciplinary practice repositions drawing as a system of inscription through which materials are condensed, rerouted, and made to bear weight. She engages synthetic hair, indigo, kola nut, and gold as active agents within systems of circulation and material exchange. Her practice approaches substrate not as passive surface but as infrastructure, a site where histories accumulate and spatial relations are pressurized and reorganized. Across large-scale drawing, sculpture, and installation, Kure extends inscription from surface to structure.
Kure’s work will be included in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2026). In addition to solo exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the Netherlands, England, and the United States, her work has been presented at La Triennale, Paris (2013); the International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville (2006); and the Sharjah Biennial (2005). She participated in the 11th Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar (2014), and was included in the traveling exhibition Body Talk, shown at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; Frac Lorraine, Metz; and Lunds Konsthall, Sweden. She also participated in Not a Single Story at Wanås Konst, Sweden, and NIROX Sculpture Park, Johannesburg (2018–19).
Kure served as visiting professor at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2019–20). She was a Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution (2008), a Visual Artist in Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014), and the recipient of the Uche Okeke Prize for Drawing (1994).
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Newark Museum of Art; the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art; the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University; Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth; Frac Lorraine, Metz; and the Menil Collection, Houston, among others.
Marcia Kure Photographed by ©Buzu Ameh 2025
Projects & Exhibitions
Menil Wall Drawing, NETWORK
Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, Texas, 2021
Kure’s wall drawing used the line as a metaphor of contemporary and historical trade routes. In her formulation, the line is not only a mark; it is activated in space through the movement of bodies in daily actions. In NETWORK, the use of kola nut, indigo, tea, and charcoal as drawing media highlights not only their material properties, but their status as commodities that trace and map the African diaspora.
These largely invisible networks are traced across space and time, making connections that implicate the viewer in a complex history of migration, labor, and exploitation. Furthering this narrative, the installation included two African sculptures placed on pedestals, one in the style of a Mande headdress and the other of a Dogon female figure, modified by the artist with the addition of synthetic hair extensions.
Alexander McQueen, Process
London, 2022
For the 2022 Process project, Alexander McQueen creative director Sarah Burton collaborated with 12 international female artists to reinterpret looks from the Pre-Autumn/Winter 2022 collection. The artists, whose works were displayed alongside the garments, include:
Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Beverly Semmes, Bingyi, Cristina de Middel, Guinevere van Seenus, Hope Gangloff, Marcia Kure, Jackie Nickerson, Jennie Jieun Lee, Judas Companion, Marcela Correa, and Marcia Michael.
Reticulation
Susan Inglet Gallery, New York 2022
Reticulation investigates our shared responsibility in perpetuating networks of exchange. Focusing on gestural lines, Kure employs marks as a means of illuminating the contemporary resonance of systems indebted to colonial histories. Through her signature use of canvas and paper soaked in natural pigments-indigo and kola nut- the artist physically imbues her work with the commodities that were once a mainstay of transatlantic commerce.
Kure considers the histories of her chosen mediums as implicated in colonial networks of exchange. Indigo, for example, reveals the cross-cultural movement between Europe, India, and the Americas. Europeans were first introduced to indigo through trade with India. Wanting a cheaper source of the opulent commodity, European settlers began cultivating the crop in North America. As indigo extraction is a particularly labor-intensive process, the import of enslaved Africans escalated in the southern colonies as a result of the indigo boom of the mid-18th century. By using indigo, the artist activates the material’s fraught history, emphasizing the movement of goods and bodies that took place to cultivate the crop– and subsequently to create her work.
News & Updates
Selected exhibitions, appointments, and announcements
