Kamilah House

I am a Black woman. Bahamian and African American. A diplomat brat. An Emory graduate. A Madeira girl. I grew up in Prince George’s County, Nigeria, Algeria, Virginia, Illinois, and Iowa—moving across geographies that taught me how identity shifts depending on who is looking.

These works are about markets on both sides of the Atlantic. Open-air markets. Street vendors. Informal economies. Places where goods, stories, language, rhythm, and survival strategies circulate. Markets are not just commercial spaces—they are sites of negotiation, memory, improvisation, and power.

There is a river that runs through all of it. The Atlantic. Not just as water, but as inheritance. As rupture. As connection. As bloodstream. That river flows through our veins as members of the diaspora. It carried violence and extraction. It also carried music, foodways, faith, resistance, and the stubborn insistence on joy.

I work in mixed media collage because collage mirrors that history. Nothing arrives whole. It arrives fragmented, transported, traded, torn, renamed, reassembled. I layer paper, paint, texture, and pattern the way history layers itself onto the body. Some elements are visible; others are buried but still shaping the surface. That tension matters.

Markets, like collage, are about value. Who sets it. Who benefits. Who labors. Who survives. My work asks viewers to consider what is being exchanged—beyond goods. What stories are circulating? What histories are priced too low? What identities are misread at first glance?

These pieces hold both commerce and memory. Both movement and rootedness. Both loss and continuity.

The river is still moving. So are we.

Kamilah House, Self-Taught Artist.