FRANKLIN, KRISTA

Krista Franklin

American, b. 1970

Hip-Hop by Default, 2009
Archival Inkjet Print
10 x 10" Image on 12 x 12" Paper
Edition of 30

Krista Franklin is a multidisciplinary visual artist and poet who creates fantastical and surrealist works using collage, papermaking, printmaking, and installation. She often appropriates historical imagery with pop culture to merge notions of the past, present, and future, while challenging views of gender, race, and culture. Franklin regularly works with the medium of collage, appreciating how many small pieces can come together to create a greater whole. Hip Hop by Default (2009) incorporates photographs from Ebony, XXL, National Geographic, and VIBE magazines, among other sources, with pieces of sewing pattern paper onto cardboard. She has explained, “I appropriate image and text as a political gesture that chisels away at the narratives historically inscribed on women and people of color, and forge imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions.”[1] Heavily influenced by music, Franklin originally created this work as an album cover for the independent artist, rapper, and activist Unmuvabo (also known as TeQuila Sahaya Shabazz) in 2009.

Franklin completed her BA from Kent State University, Ohio, and her MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Columbia College Chicago (2013). She has participated in artist residencies at A Studio in the Woods, New Orleans; Cave Canem Foundation, Brooklyn; and the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life Initiative. Her book Under the Knife was published by Candor Arts in 2018 and Study of Love & Black Body was published by Willow Books in 2012. Her work has been featured in Poetry and BOMB magazines, as well as in the anthologies The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape (2018) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015), among others.  Her work has been included in exhibitions at Rootwork Gallery, Chicago; the Studio Museum, New York; the Chicago Cultural Center; the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Orlando, Florida; the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina; and the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; among others. Her work was featured in the 2018 MoCP exhibition Echoes: Reframing Collage and appears in two seasons of 20th Century Fox’s television show Empire.

[1] "Krista Franklin." Public Space One. Accessed April 29, 2019. http://www.publicspaceone.com/events/krista-franklin.