An Artist, Leader, Activist, Poet, Teacher, Director, and Facilitator.
artist statement
In March of 2024 I decided to do my capstone project for my MFA about challenging the dominant narrative American society has about menstruation: that it is disgusting, smelly, dirty, something to hide, something to be silent about. I felt devastated that we had been fooled to believe the natural process that allows us to procreate was something to be afraid of instead of celebrated, uplifted, honored, held with tenderness, and revered in the light of God’s eye.
Within the African Diaspora, we have been conditioned to believe our indigenous ways of being are demonic, evil, and negative in an attempt to erase our power and make us forget the inherent magic within our roots. Through colonization, white supremacy culture has attempted to orient us around a narrative of God that ignores the traditions in which those of the African Diaspora were closest to spirit, and teaches us to see fear and submission as divine order.
For example, Europeans created the term “witch” as a way for men to subjugate and dehumanize women and restrict them from using the power God gifted them with. The Ìyààmi Àjé are a force in traditional Yoruba cosmology that remind us that menstruating bodies can never be silenced or controlled. Colonization has sought to erase and abuse our divine power by stripping us farther and farther away from our indigenous ways of communing with God and honoring our ancestral lineages.
Translated from Yoruba, “Ìyààmi” means “my mothers” and describes the power of the primordial mothers. “Àjé” refers to a spiritual power resident in menstrual blood that can create lives, import sacred genetic coding, and devolve destinies. The “Ìyààmi Àjé” describes the power that menstruating bodies are born with, the ability to access and wield àṣẹ́: the divine life force in all things, personal spiritual authority and power, and a concept for spiritual growth.
As I began developing a series of pieces that honored menstruation, I discovered in June 2024 that I was growing a baby in my womb. At that point the project transformed to honor a wider spectrum of the complexities of birthing bodies by honoring the womb. Led by the concepts spirit placed on my heart, I allowed each idea to tell me what medium they needed to be expressed in - resulting in a collection of art made of glass, textiles, paint, beads, shells, and ceramics.
The exhibit, “Returning to the Womb”, is an immersive project that examines perceptions of the divine femanine and àṣẹ́ through the lens of traditional African spirituality. The body of work presented is a call to action to reorient ourselves to matrilineal ways of governing by uplifting the power of the womb and charging our communities to be in deep reverence to femininity, love, sensuality, and creation.
In “Returning to the Womb”, Reyna invites viewers to reflect on their relationship to the womb by affirming the inherent power in the act of menstruation, and honor the home that gave all of us life. Through activating a multitude of materials, she highlights the ways in which the body’s ability to birth transcends this physical realm by communing with divine forces of nature.
