Meron Engida

About the guest

Painter Meron Engida creates vibrant tableaus that act as a vehicle for exploring the artist’s personal experiences and Ethiopian cultural identity. Through trust in the mark-making process, Engida has developed a rich visual vocabulary which draws influence from the colors and narratives of ancient Ethiopian art. At the intersections of abstraction and figuration, Engida’s works center a cast of expressive figures who together tell stories of vulnerability, empowerment, and resilience. Fusing memory and imagination, Engida layers ​​tones, symbols, and motifs to construct emotive scenes intended to prompt dialogue about diversity and women’s experiences. 

Engida’s latest body of work illustrates the impacts of war and climate change upon everyday lives, honoring the experiences of women and children living amidst the ongoing Ethiopian War. With palettes of acrylic and oil pigment, the artist here employs a system of dots, used to symbolize water, earth and teff. In “Teff teffa”, the artist gestures towards the growing inaccessibility of teff—the staple grain used to make injera—due to war, drought, and global demand, demonstrating these forces’ impact on the foundations of Ethiopian cultural identity.

Celebrating 12 years of placing exceptional contemporary art in global private and public collections.

Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora. 

Morton Fine Art founded the trademark *a pop-up project in 2010. *a pop-up project is MFA’s mobile gallery component which hosts temporary curated exhibitions nationally.

The Truth In This Art
The Truth In This Art is a podcast interview series supporting vibrancy and development of Baltimore & beyond’s arts and culture.

Mentioned in this episode
Morton Fine Art

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