Rebecca Marimutu

About the Artist

Rebecca Marimutu is a photographer from New York City, based in Baltimore working to reimagine the practice of portraiture. Her practice explores themes of self, identity, and material tactility through photography, collage, paper sculpture and audio-visual abstraction. Informed by her experience as an multiracial woman born and raised in New York City she works to expand discussions around the materiality of the photograph through concealing, obscuring, and protecting that which lies within the frame. Her work has been shown at Waller Gallery, Catalyst Contemporary, Black Artists Research Space, and Eubie Blake Cultural Center in Baltimore, MD. In 2020, she received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Photographic and Electronic Media, with a concentration in Critical Studies. She is currently an adjunct photography professor at MICA and Towson University.  

Artist's Statement

I am interested in abstraction as a means of protest, insofar as it breaks through ways we are often allowed to see ourselves in contemporary art. As Black artists, particularly Black women artists we are often limited to or only awarded for work based in figuration. The forms through which we are allowed to view images of ourselves are often determined by voices, opinions, and structures that do not look like us. My intention is to use abstraction to both deconstruct and obscure the image of the self—the image of us and the pressure to be represented.