Grant Recipients Grants to Artists Visual Arts 2026

Kearra Amaya Gopee

Portrait of Kearra Amaya Gopee. Gopee stands on a sidewalk, looking into the camera while resting their arms on a black iron gate. They are wearing a black leather jacket, sunglasses with a thick rectangular white frame, a silver chainmail necklace, a silver hoop earring, a silver curved barbell eyebrow ring, and black lipstick.
Photo by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
  • 2026 Grants to Artists
  • Visual Arts
  • Anti-disciplinary artist
  • Born 1994, Miami, FL, raised in Carapichaima, Trinidad and Tobago
  • Lives in Brooklyn, NY
  • They/Them
  •  
  • Additional Information
  • kearramaya.com

Artist Statement

time will find you regardless

On the verge of place, satisfaction, the verge of hope and of home, on the verge of language, I exist—me and my practice, my mind, my incoherence, my self. This plane of existence, mediated by violence, is only as tangible as an unanswerable question—one that sits deep in the gut, begging for articulation, but unraveled by the illusion of clarity. I saw you there too, and had to say something, by whatever means necessary. Did you hear it? Do you consent to your own undoing? Can you relinquish your attachment to the known world as it demands everything and gives so little? 

Sing until you sync, sing until you sink, be as slow as you need because time will find you regardless. 

I work towards discipline’s rupture. I am a storyteller drawn to contradiction, rehearsal, refraction, revision, and collaboration. Whereas disciplining entails the prerequisites of expertise and capture, anti-disciplinarity reminds me to engage in modes of flight, a marooned gesture enlivened by the generativity of a Black(ened) praxis—a refusal soaked in desire evaporating overhead.

- December 2025

Biography

Kearra Amaya Gopee is an anti-disciplinary artist working for, with, and through the Caribbean and its diasporas. Their practice is illuminated by a series of interventions moved by the spirit of marronage (an act of self-liberation). Gopee identifies violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. They render this violence elastic and atemporal, leaving ample room for the consideration and manipulation of its history, implications on the present, and possible afterlives. Gopee makes visible the complex affective and psychological terrains that constitute the Black Caribbean subject.

For Gopee, the role of collectivity and community as both sites of, and antidotes to, the alienation and abjection imbued in migration, place-making, and memory cannot be overstated. They use a variety of media to delve into themes of violence, identity, and history, employing meticulous, slow, extended, and often atemporal exercises of collaboration toward the production of work. The result upends core tenets of linearity and empiricism that regularly condition the disciplining of Black, queer, Caribbean subject(ivities). The bedrock of their praxis is their revision process, which conjures faith and devotion as creative and expressive materials. 

Gopee's divinity surplus (2024), a single-channel video projection and sculptural installation, is a somatic meditation on the efficacy of hope as a tool for determining and structuring collective desires. The work draws heavily from medieval Christianity, with the installation’s apparatus—a hybrid of a torture rack and a Singer sewing machine—and video captions inviting participants to question the nature of hope. Gopee asks us to consider what it means to hope for another and how to navigate dissonance. The video projected onto the surface of the apparatus is reminiscent in shape to both a blinking eye and the stigmata of Jesus Christ. They ask: when suffering affords you no salvation, how do you figure hope?

Group exhibitions and screenings featuring Gopee’s work include Imaging Improvisation at Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY (2025); Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick, Scotland (2025); the Caribbean Film Series, curated by Third Horizon in partnership with the Luminal Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY (2024); Deep in the Mud, We Are Enmeshed in All Its Forms, REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA (2023); and ca(r)milla at gallery Albany, Albany, NY and the Video Viewing Room at The Kitchen, New York, NY (2023). In 2026, Gopee will participate in the 59th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. 

Gopee has attended residencies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2025); Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2024); MacDowell, Peterborough, NH (2023); NLS Kingston, Kingston, Jamaica (2018); Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME (2018); among others.

They were awarded an Artist2Artist Fellowship from Art Matters Foundation (2025), the Elaine G. Weitzen ISP Studio Program Fellowship at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, NY (2023), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2023), and a Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellowship from Queer|Art (2022).

Gopee is developing an artist residency in Trinidad and Tobago titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. 

They hold an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Studio from the University of California, Los Angeles (2022) and a B.F.A. in Photography and Imaging from New York University (2017).

Installation view of ca(r)milla in a red-lit gallery room. There is a horizontal screen against the wall, projecting a video of a person walking outdoors in what appears to be a garden in Trinidad and Tobago. The top left corner and bottom right corner of the screen are decorated with fake hands. On the ground there is a pool made out of a mirror, bordered by soil. Part of the projection reflects from the wall and onto the pool, which has blobs of fake blood spread throughout, as well as writing in fake blood. Four small lights are at the corners of the pool. The corners each have a fake hand in the soil that is just touching the ‘water’ with its fingers. The left side of the pool is shattered by the two hands. Three wooden benches are spread along the walls. There is an old wall heater in the very left of the room.

Installation view, ca(r)milla, 2023, mirror, crocus bags, wooden frame, wooden benches, iron nails, concrete, topsoil, dimensions variable. Photo by Marc Tatti.

Red-lit installation view of a corner of the pool in ca(r)milla. The pool is made out of a mirror, which is bordered by soil. On top of the soil is a fake hand with long pink nails. The middle finger of the hand touches the edge of the pool, shattering a chunk of it. Fake blood is spread throughout the pool in both writing and blobs. The ceiling of the room reflects onto the pool.

Installation view, ca(r)milla, 2023, mirror, crocus bags, wooden frame, wooden benches, iron nails, concrete, topsoil, dimensions variable. Photo by Marc Tatti.

Video still of a close up of a persons face. Pictured are their eyes, which look into the camera, their eyebrows, and part of their nose. They are wearing sunglasses with a caramel, rectangular frame low on the bridge of their nose as the sun shines against their skin. There is greenery behind them.

Video still from ca(r)milla, 2023, single-channel video, dimensions variable. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Installation view of “divinity surplus”, a black iron structure that resembles a ladder in a dimly lit gallery room with wooden floors. Scrim is casted through the body of the piece, going over and under the panels of the ‘ladder’. Four rectangles of brown cotton with printed black text are threaded into the scrim in nearly even intervals. The text is illegible due to the distance from which the photo was taken. An elongated blue oval with grey textures is projected onto the center of the scrim, which bleeds through it onto the white wall.

Installation view, divinity surplus, 2024, untreated iron, scrim, brown cotton, embroidery thread, cables, 8' x 4'. Photo by Ally Caple.

Installation view of “divinity surplus”, a black iron structure that resembles a ladder in a dimly lit gallery room with wooden floors. Scrim is casted through the body of the piece, going over and under the panels of the ‘ladder’. Two rectangles of brown cotton with black text printed onto it are threaded into the scrim. The scrim in the lower rectangle says “How much pressure do we need to exert to right the world?”, while the scrim placed higher reads “How capacious is your vision? Is it broad enough for two right now?”. Two ovals with light blue and grey textures are projected onto the center of the scrim, which bleeds through it onto the white wall. Sheer black curtains hang to the left of the installation.

Installation view, divinity surplus, untreated iron, scrim, brown cotton, embroidery thread, cables, 8' x 4', 2024. Photo by Ally Caple.

Installation view of “pappyshow in the dark time, my love”, an immersive gallery room with orange lighting. Three projections take up the width of the three white walls, with the left and right showing mirror images of a person’s silhouette, dancing in the night with a Molotov cocktail in their hand in front of a house. The center projection shows another angle of the dancer—outlining their face, the Molotov cocktail, and more houses in the night. In the center of the room, on the ground, is a sculptural object shaped like an “8”, made of aluminum and engraved with a pattern that resembles a snake’s skin. Inside of the two centers of the “8” are two subwoofers, each covered with chainmail in the shape of round table skirts.

Installation view, pappyshow in the dark time, my love, iron, aluminum, chain mail, wood, subwoofers, mixer, amplifier, PA speakers, dimensions variable, 2022. Photo by Kyle Tata.

Excerpt from ca(r)milla, single-channel video, 2023.

Excerpt from divinity surplus, single-channel video, 2024.