Chidinma Dureke (b. 1989, Washington, DC) works in painting, sculpture, and production design. Born to parents of Igbo descent, Dureke was raised between America and Nigeria. Her cross-cultural perspective characterizes her large scale oil on canvas paintings and sculptural installations that examine the liminal moments between two worlds and psychological spaces. Dureke has exhibited her work at The Peale Museum; Howard Community College; Yale University; Dwight Hall: Center for Public Service & Social Justice, New Haven, CT; Asian Fusion Gallery,Washington, DC; and Super Wonder Gallery, Toronto, Canada; among others. She is the recipient of the Liu Shiming Art Grant, 2023 Cohort, New York; Maryland Institute College of the Art 2024 Graduate Research Development Grant, Baltimore; and the ColorCreative 2023 Find Your People Program Fellowship in Los Angeles. Recently, her work was commissioned by Issa Rae and Denise Davis for the Sony Pictures film One of Them Days, directed by Lawrence Lamont, starring SZA and Keke Palmer. Dureke holds a BFA from Frostburg State University, and MFA from The LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Dureke lives and works in Maryland, where she serves as faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art.
Every painting in my body of work is rooted in my diasporic lived experience as a Nigerian-American woman raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Working partly from personal archival imagery and from my imagination and memory, I create large-scale oil paintings and newspaper collages of intimate scenes inspired by my dual identity. Culture becomes palpable through color, as I explore the concept of hybridity and in-betweenness through gel transfers and newspaper materials that I associate with memory, history, time, and the archive.
By engaging with color as symbolic light, with space and time, with the way figures are framed in cinematography, with walls and fragments in living spaces—and even with the bittersweet taste of the diasporic experience—I synthesize these elements into a lived-in, colorful, and liminal psychological space. I seek to recreate a spiritual or magical light in my work, a light that exposes the interior self, which cannot be seen under the natural sunlight along the East Coast of the United States.
Upcoming Exhibition
Our annual group exhibition debuts the work of distinguished 2025–2027 fellows. In this presentation of new.now., each artist’s work conveys a sense of adaptability; some take on an active exercise in troubleshooting.…
