Keita Whitten * 2026 * Bowdoin, ME Art is a practice of attention— I make myself available to material, memory, body, beauty, ancestry, joy, place, grief, Spirit, and the unexpected. Because the soul, like water, is not fixed. It moves. It pools. It stagnates. It breaks through. It changes course. It remembers. It returns. And so— I make. I listen. I follow. I wait. Sometimes I understand. Sometimes I don’t. And sometimes, years later, I encounter something in the world and r

2019 revisited 2026 Keita Annie Whitten I was about thirteen when I began visiting Grandma Mais on my own. I didn’t know much about the Bronx other than the long train ride to White Plains Road on East 225th Street, and then the dreaded six-block walk from the train station to her house. Mind you, these were not Manhattan blocks. Bronx streets ran double in length. I created all sorts of scenarios to endure this walk. Like learning to bring coins to fuel up at the corner

Sweden, Maine Keita Annie Whitten · 2019 - Reimagined 2026 · Bowdoin, Maine We— chocolate-embodied wombmen— danced and drummed beneath a Scorpio Blue Moon, around a fire we built together, heeding the instructions of our Muse, Harriet, who showed us how. Before us— a panoramic sweep of the White Mountains, peaks nestled in clouds like waves rolling toward the far corners of the earth. Our nervous systems softened. We exhaled. It was our first gathering. We created sacred spac

Learn More about the Water Guardians here Keita Whitten 2026 Bowdoin, ME I arrived at Friendship’s shores in 1996. From Bedford-Stuyvesant to Friendship, Maine— an exodus North toward something new. Yemaya called me here— to a place I had never been, to begin again. Like the moon— I was full. I was expecting. A mother-to-be, searching for safety, searching for security. During my morning rituals of homage at her shore, Yémaya witnessed me. Between whispers of surf, I hear

Sacred Gems© are small works carrying big truths: We are the light we seek. We carry more strength than we know. Healing can begin in the smallest of places. And even in darkness, something sacred is waiting to be witnessed. Sacred Gems© “Sacred Gems are not only objects we can hold. Sacred Gems are also the things we learn to notice.” Art That Ministers to the Soul. Sacred Gems© began as small works of art created to carry something much larger than their size: light, be

Asesu Heals the Middle Passage to Portland, Maine emerged through my intuitive practice of Soul Mapping—a process in which I allow Spirit, memory, materials, and place to guide the work, often before I consciously understand what is being revealed. This work belongs in conversation with Olokun Heals the Middle Passage to Maine. Within the spiritual cosmology that informs my work, I understand Olokun and Asesu as different expressions of the primordial ocean mother: Olokun cal

Olokun Heals the Middle Passage to Portland, Maine began with something I could feel, but could not yet explain. The work emerged through my intuitive practice of Soul Mapping. I allow Spirit, memory, materials, and place to guide the making, without requiring myself to understand where the work is going. Sometimes an image or form arrives whose meaning becomes clear only years later. This was one of those works. At the center of the spiritual cosmology informing this piece i

The Work Sometimes Knows Before I Do I am art—the metaphysician. Soul Mapping is the intuitive, embodied process at the heart of my creative practice. It is a way of giving material form to what I feel, sense, remember, carry—and sometimes to what I do not yet consciously know. I rarely begin a work knowing exactly what it will become. I listen. I gather. I paint, build, layer, break apart, and reassemble. A piece of sea glass catches my attention. A shell. Weathered wood. St