Renée Stout grew up in Pittsburgh where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1980 from Carnegie-Mellon University. With her move to Washington D.C. in 1985, her art shifted radically, from realist painting in the tradition of Edward Hopper to mixed-media sculpture ex;exploring the artist and spiritual roots of her African heritage. Stout focuses primarily on empowering and healing rituals, looking to the systems of belief and action various African peoples and their New World descendants have adopted to influence their circumstances.

Conjuration, rootwork, folklore and music are cultural strategies that have been deployed by Diaspora Africans seeking to move from a position of oppression to one of control. Stout creates objects that image and imagine solutions to a myriad of psychic and social ills, identifying directly with the needs and desires of both petitioner and practitioner. The affective power of Stout's work resides in its richly textured references to the artistic agents of different spiritual systems: the sculpture made to contain or access various African deities; the graphic designs reproduced to praise and summon Haitian gods and goddesses in the Vodou pantheon; or the constructed devices and written formulas used in black folk conjuring, which are still available in spiritual supply stores in New Orleans and other urban areas.

Stout's work evokes the mysteries and possibilities of human experience and the strategies employed to make life better. She assembles and recreates a wide range of evocative objects, materials, symbols, and subjects to suggest multiple layers of African-American culture and history. Always present are the threads of her own personal memories, frequently woven into fictionalized narratives that accompany her pieces and animate the lives of the actor-agents she has helped invent. For Renée Stout, this work functions like a crossroads, allowing her to look back backward to her African past while simultaneously looking forward to her own empowered life: "I am trying to create art that helps me put together what are only fragments, to try to create a whole, so that I can gain a better understanding of my own existence. In doing this I hope that others, no matter where they come from, will realize some answers about their own existence.

Marla C. Berns, Director

Photographs by Wayne McCall